Autorenprofil
Julian Collin, Daniel Hame, Christian Schwalbach and Clara Wienhold from Frankfurt School Student Consulting won a 24 hour case competition, the WFI Consulting Cup in Ingolstadt.
It is past 9PM on Friday night and we have just decided on an innovative AI and analytics driven product that will help our client to regain market share, consumer satisfaction and profitability. No slide has been written yet and all of us are extremely conscious of the deadline coming ever closer. Tomorrow by 1PM we will have to submit our final presentation and the prototype for our idea and afterwards pitch it against eleven other teams with extremely talented and experienced students.
The Consulting Cup started off quite differently though. Upon our arrival in Ingolstadt on Thursday night, we had the chance to meet other participants and partner companies during dinner, a short speed dating and the subsequent champagne reception. Even though we enjoyed the relaxing atmosphere and discussions we decided to go back to the hotel rather early, anticipating we would not sleep a lot the next night.
On Friday there was another workshop on case structuring and solving by either Roland Berger, zeb or DHL Consulting before we finally gathered and Roland Berger introduced us to the case.
Our Client, a regional bank in northern Germany suffers from decreasing customer satisfaction and therefore falling profitability and revenue growth in the segment of commercial customers. Therefore we shell develop an innovative product that allows the bank to grow in the commercial sector despite fierce competition and define a customer centric new strategy.
After announcing the case the teams were quickly separated from each other and led into their respective rooms where we started to gain an overview over the vast amount of data provided to us. We weren’t granted much for that but a brief design thinking workshop led by Roland Berger followed in which we generated ideas for a new customer centric product.
Throughout the workshop as well as afterwards one of the hardest challenges for our team was to decide on something realistic but still innovative and to compromise on which customer needs we wanted to cater to. After endless discussions we finally had a concept we all liked, that was valuable to the customers and which seemed to be realistic and implementable and could finally start preparing our presentation. At 5AM in the morning we had our presentation ready and decided to get a couple of hours off sleep before giving our presentation its final touches the next morning.
We definitely needed all the time we had the next morning to finalize our presentation and made the last changes minutes before submitting it. This put us in the challenging situation to present the first time together when we were standing in front of the judges already. We were the last team of our first round group to present and were stunned by what the other teams had achieved. All the happier were we when the judges announced that we would be one of three teams that would present again in the final round.
The final round was held in front off all other participants and all company judges. After leaving the stage after the Q&A session at the end of the presentation and seeing the last team present we all were super nervous and couldn’t wait for the judges to come back and announce the results. All teams delivered great presentations so we weren’t sure if we had a chance to win. Of course you can imagine our excitement to hear that the sleepless night and all our effort put into the presentation paid off.
This mixture of excitement, happiness and too little sleep carried us euphorically through the rest of the evening with a great gala dinner and the following cocktail party.
Lastly, I would like to thank the team and the helpers from WFI School of Management for all the work and effort you put into this event. We enjoyed it a lot and loved the service. Thanks as well to all the partner companies that make such an event possible and especially to Roland Berger for preparing the case and guiding us through it.
But most of all I wanted to thank my team from Frankfurt School Student Consulting for the amazing job they did, for always keeping the motivation up and making this such a fun experience despite the stressful and competitive situation.
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