Practice With New Product Cases
Kearney First Round Case - Top Chemicals
Our client is the US-based biotech company Top Chemicals. They have just developed a fertilizer that is waiting to get approval for commercialization. They hired us to identify the best price for it.
BoxxFitness Gyms
Our client is the CEO of BoxxFitness - a leading gym chain in the US with over 1,500 gyms. BoxxFitness is a premium gym concept with an annual membership fee that is 2-3x higher than most mainstream gyms. Each gym has a limited number of membership slots. Each member gets a dedicated locker, unlimited personal training, unlimited classes, and unlimited equipment usage. In the last 3 years, the chain has seen a decline in its profit margin.
Can you identify the potential reasons for this decline?
MBB Case: JimboTel
Our client is JimboTel, an African mobile telecom company with operations in four West African countries: Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana and Sierra Leone. JimboTel has experienced revenue declines in the last two years.
How can JimboTel grow its revenues organically in the next year?
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Grain Co-operative – Brand Launch
MeGrain is a co-operative of 5000 farmers in the central part of India. As a co-operative, the farmers came together to sell the grains to retailers and wholesalers. They are the 3rd largest grain sellers in India and sell 10million quintals of grains annually. They have operations in 4 regions in India, and head office in Mumbai.
MeGrain mainly deals in 3 types of grains. Viz. Rice, Wheat, and Maze. The grains are collected from the farmers attached to the co-operative. The grains are sorted, packed, and stored at storage facilities spread across towns in the region. MeGrain sales team brings orders by visiting retailers and wholesalers across the country and abroad. The grains are dispatched directly from the storage facilities to the customers. Customers make the payment to the MeGrain co-operative, which then is forwarded to the bank accounts of the individual farmers.
MeGrain management has observed that the FMCG market, including foodgrains, is changing rapidly in India. Mom and pop stores have given ways to supermarkets. Consumers are adopting branded products rapidly. Although there is no branded grain product yet, the management believes that there is a huge scope for a branded product in the grain market as well. Management is contemplating about launching a MeGrain branded grains in the Indian market. They have called you to advise them whether they should launch their own brand in the Indian market.
CoffeeWorks reusable cups
CoffeeWorks is one of the leading coffee retail chains in the UK. The client is planning to introduce reusable cups with an aim to decrease the consumption of single-use disposable cups.
The main goal of the client is to enhance their brand image as a sustainable retailer without harming current profitability levels. Thus, they approached us to check whether they should go ahead with their plan.
MBB Final Round Case - Smart Education
Our client is SmartBridge, a nonprofit educational institution offering face-to-face tutoring services. The client operates in the US.
The mission of SmartBridge is to help as many students as possible to complete studies and prevent that they drop from the school system, in particular in disadvantaged areas.
The client is considering starting operations for its services in the Chicago area. They hired us to understand if that makes sense. Due to the nonprofit regulation, SmartBridge should operate on its own in the market, without any partnership.
How would you help our client?
LightFast - Launching high-speed broadband in Indonesia
Your client is the CSO of LightFast, a Middle-Eastern telecoms and media player. They are a national incumbent player who expanded operations into South-East Asia and North Africa in late 2010s. Their operations in Indonesia include pay-TV and fibre-optic broadband. However, the broadband business has flat-lined since launch.
LightFast is now looking to reset its Indonesian subsidiary and has asked you to advise them on whether they should re-launch or close operations.
They would like you to advice on the size of the opportunity if they were to re-launch in Y1, estimate the expected payback period and then highlight key considerations to make a go/no-go decision.
Sandwich Bags
ConsumerPackagingCo is a small, US-based consumer products packaging company that develops, produces, and sells plastic bags for storing sandwiches. The client currently owns one production line.
Since demand for their plastic bags exceeds production capacity, ConsumerPackagingCo wants to determine how they can best utilize their current production capacity to maximize profits, and whether investing in a second production line would be economically viable.
Sprinker
Sprinker is a mid-sized, US-based publishing agency that develops, produces, and sells educational materials. It has come to their attention that some private schools are considering changing their first-grade textbooks, for which they would need a publishing agency.
Sprinker is interested in participating in the closed tender and wants to determine whether this would be economically viable.
Increasing net worth of Johnny Depp
Johnny Depp, now 56 years old, has started to feel that his acting career is about to get over. His net worth crossed over $650 million at the peak of his career but has since dwindled, amid lawsuits and lifestyle expenses. As such, he thinks that his current wealth might not be enough for his upcoming years. So, he’s hired you as a consultant to help him find ways to multiply his worth. What can you suggest?
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Smart Meters
The municipal utility Hamburg Energized is a local energy retail (power and gas) and distribution grid company active in the city of Hamburg. The majority of shares of Hamburg Energized is held by the city itself. As the distribution system operator of Hamburg, Hamburg Energized is responsible for the operations and maintenance of the gas and electricity grid on customer level.
In the course of the energy transition in Germany, the responsible board member for the technical grid operations, Jan Bremer, thinks about deploying Smart Meters in the gas and electricity grid. He approaches you with the request to conduct a feasibility analysis and to give a clear recommendation whether or not Hamburg Energized should use Smart Meters in its gas and electricity grid in the future.
Bodybuilding Made Easy
Your client is a newly founded protein company. Its owners are two brothers. One of them is a chemist and the other one is a very famous fitness model and personal trainer on YouTube. They intend to enter the nutrition supplements industry where they want to focus on protein supplementation for bodybuilding. The chemist has the capabilities to produce protein products for this industry. He has used this knowledge and a substantial loan to build a factory in Germany that would allow the brothers to mass produce their protein products.
The brothers have approached you to advise them on how they can use their capabilities to profitably sell their product using their factory in Germany. They request very practical advice on how to get their product from their factory into the hands of the consumer at a profit.
The Madhouse Animation Crisis
Your client is Madhouse Studios, one of the largest anime producers in Japan. The anime-industry is flourishing. Originally revenue was generated mainly in Japan but the trend is that revenues outside of Japan are growing at a steady rate of 15% a year as more and more non-Japanese people enjoy anime. Despite this rapidly growing new segment, Madhouse lost $6m in profits at the end of 2017 even though profits were growing steadily the years before.
Madhouse has given you the objective to find the root cause of the loss in profitability and to advise them on how to proceed from here.
Coffee pads
Your client is the CEO of Wiehle, a major household appliance manufacturer. It has been decided that a coffee machine should be added to the product line. The question is how this coffee machine should be designed: either to exclusively use Wiehle pads or to be compatible with the pads of existing third-party providers as well?
Fire & Water Remediation Services
We are a profitable American provider of fire and water remediation services. We are generally hired by insurance companies to provide cleaning services in the wake of burning and flooding damages. We we would like your counsel on whether to enter the growing USA traditional residential cleaning market or not. Traditional housecleaning usually takes place 2-3 times per month.
Toothbrush disruption
We are a global toothbrush producing company. Our portfolio consists of two kinds of toothbrushes - 'manual' that sells for $5 and an electric 'rechargeable' that sells for $60.
Last year, a competitor introduced a battery-powered electric “spinbrush” that sells for $8.5 and now has 2% of the toothbrush market.
We don't have a similar offering and would like you to tell us whether we should develop a similar product or not.
Diagnosis: Acquisition ache
Your client is part of AtoZ Ltd., a diversified multinational company with a health care division that produces medical instruments and related services. Three years ago, AtoZ expanded into health care software industry by acquiring HappyHealth SE, which is selling administrative IT systems to large hospitals in Europe. While they provide strong support systems for back-office processes, their products do not offer physician or technical support nor a patient management system. The software division has continued to disappoint in growth rates, making it hard to justify the premium AtoZ paid to acquire HappyHealth three years ago. As shareholders rally to demand solutions, the devastated Head of Operations of HappyHealth turns to you and asks for potential strategies to increase revenue.
Children vaccine
Beyer, one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, just invented a very reliable vaccine against Chickenpox, a disease that affects children in the age from 2 to 16 years.
Beyer came to you wondering what their potential sales in Europe in the first year would be if they launched this product next year. They are only interested in the overall sales revenue as they already know that the vaccine can be sold for a profit. This is more meant to show them how big the volume they have to supply is and what the revenue would be.
Perpetual motion
After a congress about general science in which you took part out of personal interest, a renowned scientist comes to talk to you. He swears he invented the world’s first perpetual motion apparatus. It requires no energy source and keeps running forever. It can even turn a small fan with its motion.
The scientist asks you in which markets he can monetize the invention and how much money he could make in Europe in the first year.
Digital Lab at LETA Bank (McK/BCG Digital)
Let’s assume our client is LETA Bank, a large Central European bank with around 3M customers and within the top five banks in the mid-sized European country where it is operating. In a recent benchmarking exercise led by the European banking group that owns the bank, LETA Bank appears to be underperforming relative to competitors in terms of its personal loan sales. Our objective is to support LETA Bank in identifying the root cause of its underperformance and to develop a strategy for addressing it.
The bank recently hired a new CTO who is excited about working with us and whose hypothesis is that the bank is currently lagging behind in terms of its digital assets and products, which makes it fall short of customer expectations, thus leading to lower sales across its product groups and especially in its most popular lending product – the personal loans.
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