Looms of Ladakh (LL) is a women's cooperative that has a vision to empower the local women artisans by not just upskilling but also making them independently manage the entire cooperative. The cooperative is managed and governed by the local artisans and has recently hired talent from leading design and management schools to oversee their operations. The founders realized that to scale up and collaborate with design houses and online retailers, and thereby increase their presence and profits, they will have to work in a more structured and data-driven fashion. Optimal use of resources and material is key to compete in the modern market and sell their products in international market at competitive prices. The case provides the students an opportunity to come up with a resource optimzation model using the data collected by LL over a period of time. The objective is to help LL earn maximum profits by making optimum usage of the avaibalbe human and material resources and by identifying an optimal product mix that maximizes their profitability.
Rotary Central TTK-VHS Blood Bank, situated in the premises of a multi-specialty hospital named, Voluntary Health Services (VHS) in Chennai, is a supplier of safe blood and blood components to various hospitals across Chennai. VHS is a non-profit organization serving the needy sections of the society. It procures blood from voluntary donors by organizing blood donation camps at various places in Tamil Nadu and separates blood into its components after appropriate testing of the collected blood. It also makes arrangement for regular blood transfusion for Thalassemia patients in its hemophilia center. Since blood and blood components are perishable and have a short shelf life, accurate forecasting of demand for various components of blood is essential. Due to gap in supply and demand and perishability of blood components, Athmanathan, CAO (Chief Administrator) of VHS Blood Bank felt that the data could be used to predict the future demand on a daily basis and to help in planning blood donation camps accordingly.
Fantasy sports is the fastest growing online gaming industry worth several billion dollars. An important debate associated with fantasy sports across the world is whether it is a game of skill or chance. In India, the online gaming laws are not very well defined and hence there is always a threat to fantasy sports companies of getting into legal battles. While the game of skill is permitted by Indian laws, game of chance is strictly prohibited. Indian courts have recognized that no game is a game of pure skill or game of pure chance. When there is a chance involved, the Indian courts decide based on the dominant factor test that requires determining whether skill is dominant, or chance is dominant factor for a given instance. Ramasubramanian Sundararajan (Ramsu), the head of AI at the Cartesian Consulting was convinced that the debate around whether the dominant factor is skill or chance should be settled using data. With this objective, Ramsu approached Dream 11, one of the largest fantasy sports companies in India. Dream 11 has created fantasy games for sports such as cricket, football, hockey, kabaddi, and the National Basketball Association (NBA). Being a cricket fanatic, Ramsu wanted to check whether fantasy games played in cricket involves skill or not. Ramsu was convinced that several hypotheses can be designed and tested to check whether fantasy sports is skill dominant or chance dominant.
Jayalaxmi Agrotech (JAT) is a company based out of a small village called H.B. Halli in Bellary district of Karnataka, which helps farmers in availing correct and timely information at their fingertips using mobile technology. JAT created a mobile app which can be used to access information about various crop varieties, diseases, fertilizers, and pesticides and other details on irrigation, micronutrients, etc. This app pushes data on almost real-time basis to a server regarding the features accessed by the farmers from the app. This data can be analyzed to assess the usage of the app and some of the attributes can act as proxy data to understand prevalent diseases and the varieties of crops grown in specific areas. Anand, the founder of JAT, wanted to understand this data and gain some valuable insights which could help farmers with decision making. The major dilemma for Anand was to either prove or disprove several claims about plant diseases that were prevalent among the farmers.
Flipkart, the poster child of Indian e-commerce, was an early entrant in the nascent Indian e-commerce market and quickly established itself as the leading company in this space. Flipkart has grown into an online retail giant, valued at over USD 15.2 billion as of 2015. Flipkart has been selling over 30 million products from more than 50,000 sellers in 70+ categories as well as has 30 exclusive brand associations with an in-a-day guarantee in 50 cities and a same-day guarantee in 13 cities. Flipkart was 33,000 people strong and had over 50 million registered users with over 10 million daily visits and 8 million shipments per month. Flipkart has been putting in much effort and emphasis on the use of Analytics in every aspect of decision making. Headed by Ravi Vijayaraghavan, the analytics team had over 100 data scientists in 2015. Customer churn is a major concern for Flipkart since it has direct impact on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). CLV is an important measure to differentiate customers, which can further help the organization manage them effectively. The main challenge in calculating the lifetime value of customers of e-commerce companies such as Flipkart is that the exact life of the customer is unknown owing to data truncation, that is, the actual point in time of customer churn, which may not be identified in e-commerce since there would be no prior communication from the customer about the churn. Hence, traditional models of CLV calculation may not be appropriate for e-commerce companies such as Flipkart.
Flipkart, the poster child of Indian e-commerce, was an early entrant in the nascent Indian e-commerce market and quickly established itself as the leading company in this space. Flipkart has grown into an online retail giant, valued at over USD 15.2 billion as of 2015. Flipkart has been selling over 30 million products from more than 50,000 sellers in 70+ categories as well as has 30 exclusive brand associations with in-a-day guarantee in 50 cities and same-day guarantee in 13 cities. Flipkart was 33,000 people strong and had over 50 million registered users with over 10 million daily visits and 8 million shipments per month. Flipkart has been putting in much effort and emphasis on the use of Analytics in every aspect of decision making. Headed by Ravi Vijayaraghavan, the analytics team had over 100 data scientists in 2015. Customer churn is a major concern for Flipkart since it has direct impact on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). CLV is an important measure to differentiate customers, which can further help the organization to manage them effectively. The main challenge in calculating the lifetime value of customers of e-commerce companies such as Flipkart is that the exact life of the customer is unknown owing to data truncation, that is, the actual point in time of customer churn, which may not be identified in e-commerce, since there would be no prior communication from the customer about the churn. Hence, traditional models of CLV calculation may not be appropriate for e-commerce companies such as Flipkart.
Mission Hospital started its operations on April 02, 2008 with the aim of providing highest quality patient care facilities to all individuals at affordable rates. This super specialty hospital located in Durgapur, West Bengal, India, specializes in cardiac surgeries. Many of its patients are from nearby states and neighboring countries, and are covered under different health schemes. Among hospitals in India, flat rate for different treatments is becoming popular, mainly owing to healthcare tourism and government schemes. Dr. Satyajit Bose, chairman of Mission Hospital, was considering adoption of a package pricing (flat fee) strategy under which patients would be provided a fixed price for their treatment at the time of admission. This would imply that the package price should be calculated by the hospital on the basis of patient's clinical and non-clinical information available at the time of admission. Flat fee (or package pricing) can result in a loss to the hospitals if they do not accurately estimate the treatment cost for a patient. The hospital faces the challenge of identifying the key factors that drive the total cost of treatment so that it can quote an appropriate price to the patient.
Mission Hospital started its operations on April 02, 2008 with the aim of providing highest quality patient care facilities to all individuals at affordable rates. This super specialty hospital located in Durgapur, West Bengal, India, specializes in cardiac surgeries. Many of its patients are from nearby states and neighboring countries, and are covered under different health schemes. Among hospitals in India, flat rate for different treatments is becoming popular, mainly owing to healthcare tourism and government schemes. Dr. Satyajit Bose, chairman of Mission Hospital, was considering adoption of a package pricing (flat fee) strategy under which patients would be provided a fixed price for their treatment at the time of admission. This would imply that the package price should be calculated by the hospital on the basis of patient's clinical and non-clinical information available at the time of admission. Flat fee (or package pricing) can result in a loss to the hospitals if they do not accurately estimate the treatment cost for a patient. The hospital faces the challenge of identifying the key factors that drive the total cost of treatment so that it can quote an appropriate price to the patient.