Bharti Airtel is an Indian telecommunications company facing enormous growth – 100% per year! As a result, they are spending a lot of time renegotiating contracts with IT and telecom providers. To date (mid 2004) Bharti Airtel has been paying for IT and telecom equipment expenses separately from the providers’ contracts; they are considering making the providers responsible for that, i.e. outsourcing equipment costs.
You are already given three alternatives: 1) don’t change anything, 2) go to IBM as the vendor, 3) go to Ericsson, Nokia, and Siemens as the vendor. Analyze these three possibilities in your case study, and add one more alternative of your choosing.
Follow the usual case study format.
For your decision criteria, consider the impact of the type of business, their competitive environment, impact on existing Bharti Airtel employees, and anything else you deem relevant.
Written case studies should follow this structure:
Cover page and table of contents
Executive summary – should be brief (1/2 page), and summarize the problem, alternatives examined, and your recommendation.
Problem statement – should include describing relevant key symptoms of the problem (e.g. increased competition, lack of profitability, etc.).
Data analysis – should quantify the problem (possibly based on analysis of the data exhibits given in the text), and provide more specific examples of its scope, breakdown, or other key information.
Key Decision Criteria – these should be the basis for evaluating the alternative solutions. These criteria should be traits of the solution you can measure.
Phrase them like commands, like ‘increase market share’, or ‘reduce transportation costs’, etc.
Be as specific as possible – ‘increase profits’ could imply increasing sales, reducing overhead, reducing staffing, improving market share, buying your competition, etc.
Alternatives analysis – should describe at least three alternatives to solve the problem. One is, of course, the actual solution used by the company. The others you invent.
It helps to give each alternative a brief name (e.g. Only Sell Books, or Close Failing Departments), and refer to them that way throughout the document.
Judge (i.e. score) all of the alternatives based on the decision criteria, and how well they help achieve the goals stated therein. You can choose your scoring approach; a binary yes/no score is probably too coarse, but a scale of 1 to 3, or as much as 1 to 5 points for each criterion could work.
Recommendations – states what your recommended course of action is to solve the problem.
Your recommendation should be the highest scoring alternative.
No, you don’t have to follow the course that the actual company took; maybe you have a better idea!
The Action and Implementation Plan is not needed.
(optional) If you have exhibits, include them at the end.
Graphing select pieces of data from the case study exhibits can be very helpful.
Make sure to cite and discuss your exhibits in the body of your case study – don’t just leave them orphaned at the end of the document.
The case studies do not have specific page limits, but as a guideline, it’s hard to do all of the above well in less than 5-6 pages.