Simon Kucher & Partners Associate Interview Questions and Answers

Round: Manager + Lead round (not sure what kind of round is this)
Experience: details about the work profile, most of which never happened post joining.

General Tips: If you come from technical background, please do not join PwC SDC and jeopardize our career. There is no technical setup, neither any infrastructure, technical work wont just happen except for few bits n pieces UI work here n there. This is not a company for technical people.
Skills: Communication
Duration: 1-4 weeks

Round: Test
Experience: Syllabus for written test is CMA Syllabus, general knowledge in Computer.

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Be preaperd for the role for which you ra egoing

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Keep prepared of basic concepts of the tech stack mentioned in your resume and also be prepared to explain in well what u have done until now

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Don't be nervous and don't prepare too much cuz it'll just make the convo go more artificial so be relaxed/confident and just go with the flow.. keep it real

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Be confident and don't lie if can't handle it.

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: I started off saying that the problem statement looks like it’s a Go/NoGo decision we have to help make, so first we should establish the exact objective against which we would measure our decision. Once the objective is clear, we would need to establish our current performance against the objective, what is the target level we wish to achieve on that particular objective and then evaluate if the new terminal would help us achieve that or not. But before that I would like to clarify about exactly what is meant by a terminal here.
JC: Heathrow is one of the busiest airports and already has 4 different passenger terminals, now they want to add a 5th. A terminal provides the usual services like Bays for Boarding & disembarking, Check-In, Security, Lounges & shopping areas etc.
Me: Great, do we also have to look at the financial and operational viability of the terminal or that is not a concern.
JC: for the purpose of discussion let’s ignore that, those would not be the constraints.
Me: Ok, so maybe we should the start looking at what the administrations core objective is for the new terminal. Why does it want to come up with a 5th terminal?
JC: Why don’t you tell me what those objectives could be?
Me: Well there could be many (started jotting down options in parallel as I spoke): 1) increase the #Passengers served per year, 2) Reduce Flight Congestion if any, 3) Reduce the Time spent by flights on the airport, 4) Increase the airports revenue sources. Am I missing any other?
JC: No I think you have mentioned the major ones, let’s briefly talk about each of these. What do you mean by the revenue sources?
Me: Then we had a brief discussion about revenues from shopping areas etc. Then we came to Flight congestion – primary metric there was time spent in air waiting for permission to land etc. Then we came to #Passengers served per year which is more of a demand metric and effectively dependent on the number of flights we can serve per day. We also discussed Time spent by flights on the airport and split that into further two types – flight landing and takeoff time and turnaround at the gates. At the end of this brief digression it emerged that if Time spent by Flights on airport can go down, #Flights can go up and so can #passengers, at the same time congestion can go down as well. Me: (summarizing) So is it fair to say that the objective of building the 5thterminal is to achieve a higher capacity at the airport and our problem definition is to evaluate that claim?
JC: Yes, if you wish to frame it so - effectively our problem definition is if the 5th terminal adds to the capacity of the System? Me: Good just give me a minute to put my thoughts in place as to how we can go about evaluating this?
JC: Sure..
Me: Ok as I mentioned, what we need to decide what is the exact metric used for measuring Capacity? Then what is the current value of airport for that metric? Then what impact would the new terminal on the level of the metric? That should lead us to an answer.
JC: Ok, so what do you want to know
Me: How do airports measure their capacity?
JC: Two commonly used metrics are ATM – Air Traffic Movements, and MPPA – Million Passengers Per Annum. For our discussion lets focus on ATM.
Me: So just to clarify ATM refers to a single air traffic movement, therefore the turnaround of one flight i.e. landing and take off would count as one or two ATMs?
JC: Two Me: Ok, so do we know what is the current ATM?
JC: How would you find that out?
Me: well the annual ATM would be average Flights per day * 365 * 2 JC: Right lets keep the analysis to per day Me: Ok so what’s the current #daily flights?
JC: Am not sure why that is relevant here for answering our question but lets say 100.
Me: No, this would help us by how much will the Terminal increase the capacity. Ok so how many Bays would there be in the new terminal?
JC: 50
Me: And do we know on average one flight spends how much time at a Bay?
JC: 60 minutes
Me: Is that number in line with international standards or is there scope to impact that by way of terminal design or operations?
JC: No that’s about the best you can get ☺
Me: Fair is the distribution of traffic the same through out the day, or in other words is the demand pattern similar through out the day or is it varying with time? JC: Let’s assume that a bay is utilized effectively only for 12 hours in a day. Me: Ok so that means a given bay has the capacity of 2 ATMs per hour or 50 bays together would add 50 * 2 *12 or 1200 ATMs
JC: So should we add Terminal 5?
Me: Well yes from our analysis so far it does appear that adding the 5 Terminal could add upto 1200 ATMs per day and therefore one should go ahead.
JC: But what was our problem definition?
Me: (a little flustered) will the new terminal add to the capacity of the airport?
JC: yes of the entire system. So will it?
Me: (suddenly a light bulb strikes ☺, smiling) Ok I possibly get the drift of what you are trying to hint at, while the terminal has the potential to add so many ATMs, it is not necessary that the capacity of the entire system will be incremented by that number.
JC: Correct, and why that may be so? Me: Because the bottleneck in the system may be some where else.
JC: Right and so what defined a bottleneck Me: In any system the resource which has the lowest capacity and for which the implied demand is higher than its capacity constitutes a bottleneck, and also limits the throughput of the entire system.
JC: So what else could be a bottleneck in the system? Me: Runway JC: Ok and how can we find that out?
Me: We need to evaluate the utilization of the runway. How long does it typically take for a successive takeoff or landing on a given runway?
JC: How can we find that out?
Me: A mathematical way to do that would be to find the typical distance an aircraft travels while landing/takeoff and at what speed to find the time for which it uses the runway, another could be that there would be some minimum time set by the ATC/guidelines as the minimum inter flight time that would limit the number of planes that can use a runway.
JC: Right, let’s leave the mathematical way, what do you think the other number is?
Me: I don’t know for sure, but from my observation the time in India is something like 5-6 minutes between flight landings/takeoffs
JC: Ok those might be t he numbers in India, but Heathrow is a very busy airport and there the minimum time is 90 seconds.
Me: (quickly doing the numbers) 90 seconds implies 1 ATM every 1.5 minutes or a max of 40 ATMs per hour or a max of 40*24 = 960 ATMs per day per runway.
JC: Correct, so assuming there are 2 runways already what would now be the impact of adding the terminal 5 on the capacity of the system?
Me: Let’s assume that the current capacity of the terminals is X, then the current capacity of the system is min(960*2, X), and after the new terminal comes online the capacity of the system would become min(960*2, X + 1200). (I actually clearly wrote down the mathematical form) So depending on the value of X we will know how much the capacity of the system can improve by, and our decision should be driven by if that new number is enough to achieve our goal or not? For any positive value of X > 720 it seems we will only be able to go up to a max 1920 ATMs per day, without adding a new runway or decreasing inter ATM time for runway usage.
JC: Good I think we are done with the case. Do you have any quick questions for me?
Me: Sure why don’t you tell me a bit about the nature of work you have been doing and the kind of work BTO London does?
Tips: Listen carefully, especially the case question/problem framing Maintain a pleasant disposition, Do Smile Be ready to admit your mistakes and over sights Speak slowly (Especially when dealing with international interviewers) Write down stuff in your pad - write legibly Steps should be Think, Write, Read out & Discuss. Do revise the core concepts – just helps you with the right terminology in he interviews. On the interview day take each interview on by one – Never think about any that you have already given, and nor about any to come.

Round: Case Study Interview
Experience: NFK: McKinsey has done some work in innovation in the BPO and outsourced project management space..
...yes the Process 360 & Project 360 initiatives (brought in the fact that I had gone through the article. This also happens to be Noshir’s research)...
NFK: right.. they are operational excellence frameworks we have come up with to assess the best practices in the BPO and outsourced application domains.. so the question is if you were to develop a similar framework for excellence in the product development or product development outsourcing space what metrics do you think can be used to measure those?
Sure, may I just have a minute to think this over..
NFK: Ok..
(wrote down a few bullet points and then started).. We can think of different parameters/indicators at different levels – Individual/Company/Market/Users. The idea is to measure excellence in product development by not just focusing on the inputs, and the processes, but also by outputs both direct market facing and indirect outputs.We had a 1 minute discussion about each and at the end NFK seemed reasonably satisfied with the suggestions. NFK: Great, so we all know India has been known for outsourcing in the services and process space, what do you think ails the Product development? In particular I would say some companies like Adobe, Intel, TI and MS (only to a very limited extent though) have been successful at doing product development out of India, but not many others. What do these companies do differently? What do you think have been the critical success factors for them? (took a little time to ponder over things and really tried to dig into my experiences at Adobe an TI & what I thought was salient about the senior management there – therefore the lesson – do not ignore the Sr. Management talks & Company vision and strategy meetings that you used to have back in offices ☺) Well I think two overarching factors in the success of companies like Adobe and TI have been Vision of the founder & Execution, and I would want to break down Execution further into 1) Hiring & focus on employee growth, 2) Process & Discipline, 3) Sr. Management Commitment & push back, 4) Clear & continuous communication with the International parent. It might be a coincidence but in the case of both Adobe and TI, their India offices have been led by very strong and committed senior leadership teams who have grown from within the parent companies’ home operations. Therefore, one they knew what were the parent’s best practices, and two they had the ambition to set up something in India and make it succeed. Then once they had the go ahead they focused single mindedly on the execution.... NFK: What do you think are the key strategic challenges for a company like Infosys going forward? (again after a minute of pause and jotting down stuff) I think the three key challenges would be 1) How to remain competitive now that they are in the 4B+ league and starting to compete with the big league of IBMs, Accentures, EDS etc, not just in outsourcing but end to end IT management 2) How to manage such a huge work force and manage their skills 3) How to remain relevant in the face of changing business models specially the move to hosted & cloud computing and software as a service models. NFK: Let’s talk more about the 3rd one! (He immediately latched on to the cloud computing thing.. so this is an example of a hot word for a particular interviewer) We then had a lively discussion on what cloud computing and Software as a service and software on demand is etc., and what impact can it have for IT companies and their business models. NFK: Good. Any questions that you may have for us I asked on what the role definition of BTO was and how was it different from the high-tech practice of McKinsey?
Tips: If possible do read a bit about the interviewer’s background. You wouldn’t get to know your exact interviewers till shortly before the interview so you obviously can’t read about all, but try to read up about the senior people as well as people who will be from similar backgrounds as yourself. Excellent way to do that is to get on to company sites and browse for interview panelists profiles. In the case of McKinsey, try to get to McKinsey Quarterly, and then search for the interviewer and articles written by the person Be prepared to get the broad discussion cases even in the first round. Have a perspective on the industry of your choice and or background – again a good way to do that is to browse articles and industry reports. If you are able to go through even one consulting firms site reasonably you should be in good shape. Try to change the plane of your answers depending on the interviewers interests – when to give thr 50,000 Ft view and when to give the 100 ft view. In hind sight I think the corporate strategy course had a lot of articles about outsourcing and different models of comp advantage for multinational organizations and how to leverage offices in different geographies. Though I myself didn’t recall much of that article but then it just shows you never know which reading might come in handy where ☺Have questions that you want to ask ready

Skills: Case Solving Ability, Case Analysis
College Name: Indian School Of Business (ISB)