The Mahindra War Room is one of the most coveted competitions in the premier B-School fraternity. This competition is one such platform that has established itself for giving elaborated cases which would require the participants to come up with an exhaustive and practically implementable strategic solution. Before moving ahead, we were team “3 pe 1 free” and the team comprised of
Balakrishnan M, Nishant Prakash, Ujjawal Kumar and
Yash Bhambhwani.
It all started with the Mahindra War Room 2013 when we decided that this was one competition we wanted to triumph. Taking Inspiration from the PGP 2012 team which stole the glory on the night of the Campus Finals last year, we said to ourselves “Next year that’s going to be us”. The most awaited day had arrived, when the Mahindra War Room 7 was officially launched and from the word Go our eyes were set on winning it. Our team brainstormed to decide which case to choose considering each other’s interests and prior work experience. Automotive sector was an obvious choice and the After-Market (Used cars) caselet- “Defining the hybrid play” was of particular interest to all of us. The case dealt with coming up with an E-Commerce strategy for their Used Car Industry. We locked in our choice and started working on the task with great rigor and enthusiasm. The biggest challenge was the flow of our presentation and finalizing our suggestions.
Out of fifty odd submissions, five teams got selected for the campus evaluation round. We were convinced that in order to give our team a competitive edge over others and if we wanted to make an impression, we had to break the monotony. It only took a couple of meetings for us to know the industry and start discussing on the strategies which would work better in that industry. We brainstormed every night as to how we could integrate the various platforms which Mahindra group had to offer for its used car business. The key lied in our primary surveys, how you ask? It’s simple; all our Marketing lessons would have gone to waste if we hadn’t picked up one great insight: “Give the customers what they want to experience”. This statement was the solution to most of our challenges. Following the Customer-centric approach of Marketing, we came up with an integrated business model for the Mahindra Group to synchronize their online and offline used car business model. We perfected the solution till it was ready to be presented to the panel.
Amongst the five teams, 3 had chosen to present in the domain of agribusiness, 1 in logistics and 1 in the used car market. The judgement day had arrived and we presented our business model to the panel. After an intense Q&A with all the teams, we were adjudged the Campus Winners – IIM Shillong of Mahindra War Room 2014 and we got the opportunity to represent IIM Shillong at the national finals. The glory was ours for the day.
After a short span of about 2 weeks we were flown to the financial capital (Mumbai) for the Grand Finale. It was our utmost pleasure and honour to represent IIM Shillong at the nationals of this competition in Mumbai at the Mahindra Towers which was being judged by a star studded jury
comprising of
Mr. Anand Mahindra, the Group Executive Board (GEB), and a distinguished guest list of eminent Mahindra managers. It was an experience of a lifetime to meet such personalities and exchange thoughts with them. Inspite of tasting failure at the national finals, we must say we did carry home a baggage full of experiences that would certainly help us in the future.
This article has been co-authored by Balakrishnan M and Yash Bhambhwani, students of IIM Shillong (Batch of 2015).