Centre For Railway Information Systems Senior Consultant Interview Questions, Process, and Tips

Case Study, prepping a deck and code

On the assignment provided in Round 1

• Q1. General aptitude
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• Q1. Tell me about your self
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• Q2. Family background
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• Q1. What your highest qualification
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• Q2. Tell something about your favourite subject in your graduation
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• Q1. Tell social media impact in your life in English
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• Q2. Salary discussion
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• Q1. Why McKinsey?
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• Q2. Why Consulting?
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• Q3. Think of a failure in life and how it changed you?
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• Q4. Situational questions on teamwork & how to deal with team members?
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• Q5. Finance as a specialization: what are your key learnings?
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• Q6. Social projects done at Miranda House & difficulties and uncertainty faced in those: how did I overcome them?
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• Q7. Experience at Citi: what was your project, key learnings, first corporate experience?
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McKinsey is working with an auto components supplier for automotive vehicles. Design a strategy to increase its revenues in the next 3-5 years.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

C: Is there a target revenue increase?

I: Doubling in next 3 years.

C: Which geography is our client located in?

I: India

C: Who are the takers of these auto components and where are they based?

I: Indian companies: likes of say Maruti (for 4 wheelers) and Honda (for 2 wheelers).

C: What parts/components of the automobile exactly do they manufacture?

I: Exteriors (steel fabricated parts visible externally: say doors of the car, roof).

C: Should I focus on OEMs for 4 wheelers & if yes, which specific types of 4 wheelers (say passenger vehicles or commercial vehicles)?

I: Yes, both are serviced by the client. Focus on them.

C: I'd like to understand the industry landscape: growth rate of the company vis-a-vis industry.

I: Industry has been growing steadily. Our client is present & it's not losing market share.

C: What are the distribution channels: any direct-to-consumer touchpoint?

I: They supply to OEMs and also sell replacement parts via client --> distributors --> retailers -> car owners who need replacement.

At this point, I thought I fairly understood the case-at-hand and took a couple of minutes to think.

My structure was as follows:

Step 1: Identify the different sources of revenue existing and potential: Sales to car manufacturers & replacement market (existing), new product lines (car interiors like seats/steering): potential lines.

Step 2: For each revenue line, demarcated the markets (existing geographies v/s new ones)

C: What are the KPIs in this industry for the current geographies?

I: What do you think? Focus on existing product & market.

C:
1) Interoperability among different models/carmakers

2) Quality & longevity of product

3) Service guarantee

4) Price point

I: Point 1 & 4 were the key to success in this space.

C: Could you tell me about the players in the current space & if there are any foreign forces?

I: Mentioned Chinese players and how they were flooding the market with cheaper components to which the current costs stood no competition. Please recommend both short term & long-term solutions to combat this.

C: Mentioned few points like their source of low costs was cheap steel which was 80% of the auto-body. Short Term Solution: Demand exclusivity from OEMs to sign long term contracts.

Long Term Solution: Procurement Lever, Rationalizing steel usage, alternative material R&D, brand name development.

I: Thanks, that'll be all. Please synthesize the case for me.

Guesstimate the market for niche home products for smart personal devices for households.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

It was more conversational. I did not realize when the case started.

Laid out the structure: number of HHs in India --> Urban/Rural Split --> Income split.

I: Please do the entire calculation and give me the numbers.

C: Started calculating & speaking the figures aloud.

I: Tell me the specific customer segments to target at the outset.

Identified the following target segments:

1) Rich & affluent urban nuclear families

2) Double Income No Kids segment

3) Tech-inclined singles

4) Old aged rich grandparents looking for convenience.

All aptitude and reasoning topics

• Q1. Asked about resume
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• Q1. Salary and location details
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• Q1. I have gone through your CV, but can you tell your life story and some key things from your resume?
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• Q2. If we don't make an offer to you today, what will you do and how would you react?
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• Q3. You said that McKinsey is your dream company, what is that about McKinsey?
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• Q4. Tell me about a situation when you were leading a team, and the team didn't perform to its potential, what did you do?
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I am running a very niche NBFC targeted at MSMEs. I offer hassle-free small ticket loans of about 5-10-15 lakhs through digitization. We are not growing as per our expectations, please help.
[Please note that I stands for Interviewer and C stands for Candidate] 

C: Since when are we facing the problem and what is our target for growth?

I: We want to grow 3x-4x in a year, and the problem is happening for the last 12-18 months.

C: Which cities are we targeting currently? And MSMEs in which sector particularly?

I: We are currently focused on top 10-15 cities of India, on front end, we don't have any sectoral preferences, however, in the backend, most of our loans have been granted to MSME construction firms, restaurants and garages.

C: Can I know more about the loan terms: Collateral, documentation needed, time taken to disburse loans, Interest rates, payment terms etc.?

I: Loans are collateral free, we do full documentation check: where we need bank statements and P&L statements of the MSME for cash flow estimation, GST linkages etc. As I told the process is hassle free, we provide loans in 1-2 days, and since the loans are provided quickly, interest rates are little on higher side.

C: What is the time frame we are looking at? Is there any budgetary constraint?

I: Time horizon is 6-12 months and definitely no NBFC would be burning money like that.

(CASE SOLVING: STRUCTURE)

C: As we wish to grow the number of loans disbursed, we can divide it into: Number of customers * number of loans per customer
Focusing on number of customers: we can look at 3 dimensions:

1) New markets: Outside India and Inside India (Tier 2-3 cities where most of the MSMEs are based out of)

2) New products: Expanding into banking, Fintech (Digital payments, digital insurance, wealth tech etc.)

3) Market penetration: Attracting more no. of customers in the existing market.

I: Start with 3rd part.

C: Can I know more about the distribution model, is it all digital or we also have salesforce?

I: We operate largely online, however, salesforce is used to spread word amongst MSMEs.

C: I would like to structure this ahead in terms of

1) Awareness of our NBFC

2) Loan terms attractiveness

3) Accessibility of our salesforce and digital platform

4) Experience: issues in loan disbursal process

I: Okay, start from the first one then.

C: I would like to explore all possible mediums of lead generation like telephone calls, face to face visits, emails, website, apps and affiliate marketing. is there problem across any?

I: No.

C: Based on my prior case competition experience, where I did personal surveys with 30+ MSMEs, most of the mails etc. are made in English and loads of calls and emails are considered as SPAM by MSMEs, thus I would suggest calls and mails should be made in the regional languages of the MSMEs, and for greater trust and credibility, we should reach out to trade associations like Shankar Market Trade association in Delhi.

Generally, the MSMEs. are organized into trade associations and thus reaching out directly to these trade associations and their presidents, provide greater credibility and support from MSMEs.

I: Yes, this could be done, what else? You talked about Amazon; how can we leverage them?

C: Yes, we can do affiliate marketing on Amazon and their home page.

I: What about the various sellers who are selling on Amazon, aren't they also our target market?

C: Yes, absolutely, we should rather partner with Amazon to list us as SME loan provider while a seller is registering and creating profile with Amazon, to target them in the beginning only.

I: Yes, this could also be done. What next?

C: I would like to shift to loan terms now.

You mentioned that our rate of interest in higher, is it a possibility that we can reduce them a notch?

I: The problem is that we have little data, and thus interest rates are charged higher due to limited data.

C: In that case, for gathering more data, we should make use of open banking, partner with various digital payments providers like Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay that these MSMEs use for collecting payments so that we can estimate cash flows of the MSMEs with greater accuracy based on thus data, as a result, our interest rates can also reduce.

I: Okay, what else?

C: We can also look at the tenure and frequency of payments (EMIs), increasing the tenure of loans, provides greater cushion to MSMEs and flexible loan payment terms like balloon payments, quarterly, half yearly or yearly installments rather than monthly payments, would ease the pressure on the clients. Also, we can facilitate Auto debits, ECS/NACH mechanism so that MSMEs are regular in their payments, and they don't default.

I: We are already having auto debit facility, what else?

C: I would now like to look at accessibility part. is our app present on Android/Apple phones?

I: Yes.

C: Is there any problem with loading of the website/app and working speed?

I: No.

C: Ok, then I would shift to our salesforce. Here, I would look at quantitative and qualitative factors. Quantitative: number of salesforces, number of visits made by each. Qualitative: quality of engagement with the MSMEs, negotiation skills, training, experience etc.

I: (Abruptly ended the case, and asked to tell 2-3 major ideas from the entire discussion).

Numerical Problem

I: We are a cellphone manufacturer; we are facing the following issue -

Current price: 1000$
Margin per unit: 200$
Currently selling 2 million units:

Sales head has come with the following proposal:

Reduce price by 5%, and volume would go up by 25%.

Evaluate the proposal on contribution margin basis.

Now, if you don't want your contribution to get impacted, by what percentage should your cost reduce.
Solved the numerical based on my course knowledge.