Management Consulting Cases for Job Interview

We begin with little intro into the course as well as some general info on the role of a consultant, business analyst – what skills, education, knowledge is required from you and what are the available career paths for you

In this lecture I will tell briefly about my experience and what I currently do

In this lecture I show who we mean by ideal consultants, what you have to know, where consultants are usually recruited from and what kind of characteristics you are supposed to have

Here I will show you what to do if a blurry image appears

Here I will show you how to find additional resources attached to the coruse like Excel files, presentations, links etc.

In this lecture I will show you briefly how the recruitment process to consulting looks like and what kind of hurdles you have to overcome. I will also give some info on the probabilities of getting into consultants

To be invited to the interviews your CV has to stand out among the see of others. In this lecture I will show what types of elements make your CV stand out

Hi

We are getting a lot of questions about a CV. Therefore, we have prepared a good example of a CV. It is based on one of the best CVs that I have seen. We have hired the person and he was extremely good. He worked for us for 6 months. After that, he moved to Private Equity.

I hope this CV will help you. It covers almost all the points we have mentioned in the previous lecture.

Best regards

Asen

I will make an overview of the type of questions / tasks you can get during the interview. In next lectures we will go in details

Formal recruitment process is not the only way to get into consulting. There are other, less formal methods that you can use

In this lecture you will get to know our favorite method for first rough estimation – the bottom-up method. We give you also 2 examples with Excel calculation how to use it.

Top-down is the little brother of bottom-up approach – not used that often but still very useful for re-segmenting the market (niche an low cost strategy)

In this lecture I show the backward thinking /induction. This approach enables you to design the whole process, company on the bases of the expected outcome

In many cases you can get high end result from compounding effect in time or by getting small improvements in many areas. In this lecture I will explain the concept

Issue tree is a simple yet powerful concept used in consulting for structuring discussion and picking the right topics to concentrate on. In this lecture I will show you the principles of using it as well as a practical example

In the next 3 lecture we will discuss examples of issue trees

We will look at an example of an issue tree from logistics

We will look at an example of an issue tree from retail

We will look at an example of an issue tree from FMCG

Here I will show you the so callled opportunity tree that can be used to generate new ideas

If you want to understand well a business you have to be able to identify the cost drivers that shape the business model. In this lecture I will show you how to do that

In this lecture I will discuss the role of external and internal benchmarks. They are a powerful help in business and will help you boost your productivity yet have to be used with caution. At the end I will apply them in an example to show you the difference in outcomes.

In this lecture I will show you how to use in practice 80/20 rule also known as Pareto principal

In every company you have bottlenecks that limit your ability to go forward and deliver more goods and services. Here I will show you how to estimate what is the impact for the whole system and how you can remove improve them. I will use simple production example to show you the effect on the whole system. You will see how the bottleneck can shift from 1 shift to another. You will also learn how to prioritize where it make sense to invest to get the best results.

Before doing this lecture I strongly encourage you first to take the OEE lecture – we use the OEE concept here so if you are not familiar with it please start with OEE lecture as a warm-up.

In section 4 we will start with cases. Here you will learn everything around estimating the market. I will use cases of: the TV set market, the ceramic tiles market and kids’ ware market

In this lecture you have to estimate what is the market for TVs in a specific market, what are the cost drivers. Imagine that you were asked to estimate the market for TV sets. Ask yourself 3 questions:

• What is meant here by “the market”? Annual sales or total ownership?
• Do you want the market estimation to be in volumes or in values?
• What is included in the TV sets (i.e. monitors are in or not)?

In this lecture I show you the solution to the case you had to solve in the previous lecture

Imagine that you were asked to estimate the market for ceramic tiles. You have to ask yourself the following questions:

• What is meant here by “the market”? Annual sales or total ownership?
• Do you want the market estimation to be in volumes or in values?
• What is included in market? Should we include B2C or also B2B?
• Are we talking about just ceramic tiles or other connected products

In this lecture I show you the solution to the case you had to solve in the previous lecture

Imagine that you were asked to estimate the kid’s ware market

• What do you mean by kids?
• What products do you have in mind (i.e. toys, pampers,t-shirts)?
• Do you want the market to be estimated in volumes or in values?

In the next section I will discuss strategy related cases that you may be asked to solve. I will show you how to determine the driving factors in the performance of cinemas as well as marketplaces.

Imagine that you were asked to estimate the number of cows in your country. In this case I we will try to do exactly this.

In this lecture we will solve the previously introduced case study

If you work for a retailer one of the most useful analysis is to check whether there is still potential to growth and how big it is. In this lecture I will show you 2 ways in which you can estimate how many shops you can open in a specific location, city, province. One approach will be concentrated solely on the number of shops whereas the second one will also take into account the size of shops

In this section I will show you want kind of cases relating to marketing and sales you may get during the interview. There will be examples from FMCG, retailers and service companies.

Imagine that as a consultant you were asked to analyze your client situation- FMCG producer that is using different channels of distribution. How would you check whether his using the right mix channels

Key Performance Indicators are extremely important to understand and manage a business. In this lecture, I will show you how this is achieved. In the next lectures I will show You using an example of a cinema company how to apply KPIs in practices

Imagine that our consulting company is using 4 ways to acquire customers. Try to find the most efficient ways of acquiring customers? How would you do it

Imagine that you have to decide what kind of model to pick for the SaaS business: Freemium, Free, Free Trial. In this case study, you will have to decide when each and every tactic makes sense.

Here I will show you some examples of SaaS business models using often freemium, free, and free trial.

In this lecture, we will solve the previously introduced case study.

Imagine that you were responsible for managing the cinema. What KPIs metrics you would look at to see whether you are doing a good job?

Imagine that you have a chain of physical stores and on-line store. What pricing would you use? How you would come up with the right pricing?

Imagine that you are a Retailers with 10 stores and very strong brand that are selling toys. How would you grow the business?

Imagine that you are working for a cosmetics producers. And you have to increase his sales

On market segmentation

In this secction I will show you case studies where you have to find ways to improve the profitability of a business

Here I will show you the general framework for increasing sales in FMCG

Here I will show you the general framework for increasing sales in retail.

Here I will show you the general framework for decreasing the costs in retail

Here I will show you the general framework for increasing the margin in retail

Imagine that you are working for a cosmetics producer. And you have to increase his profitability. 

In this lecture, we will solve the previously introduced case study

Cinema City has used number of techniques to sell the unused space.In this lecture I will show you some examples

Imagine that you are working for a fashion discounter that operates a retail chain in Eastern Europe. In this lecture we will find ways to increase the profitability

Imagine that you were responsible for managing a marketplace for patients and doctors (i.e. Docplanner). What KPIs you would look at

Imagine that you are responsible for managing a SaaS offering mailing What KPIs you would look at?

Here I will show you some examples of SaaS businesses

IKEA is a well know brand selling furniture. On what do you think they make their money?

Tell us what could be the business model for self driving car using canva model

Imagine that you were responsible for managing a marketplace for patients and doctors (i.e. Docplanner). You are present in Poland and now you want to expand into other countries

Niche strategy is widely used by many companies. Explain why and what kind of niches you can have

Next types of cases that you will be getting during interviews are logical, math quizzes requiring some basic math knowledge and logical thinking. I will show you in this section some examples of such

A typical for consulting interviews logical quiz

Imagine that a drunk professor left the bar with a dog and headed home. He unleashed his dog. The dog started running back and forth (from the professor to the house) at the speed of 20 km per hour. In the meantime the professor was zig-zagging home. How much distance did the dog cover if it took the professor 30 minutes to get to the home