Deloitte Consulting S&O

Well there are two case studies; they call the first case study a market sizing question and when you go online to practice market sizing questions they can be incredibly difficult like -

"What is the demand for light bulbs in Australia per annum?" – not too difficult if you've seen it before. The question i got asked for my 'market sizing' case study was:

"If you had to retire today, how much money would you need to live off for the rest of your life?" This was immensely easier than anything i had practiced online so i was a bit taken aback. I just went through a list of expenses that would account for everything i would need – house, cars, upkeep, holidays, private school education for my nonexistent children etc i then got a total and with some guidance from the interviewer I then accounted for inflation, investing and took a present value discount to get a nice round number.

The second case study is meant to be more "consulting" related; but it was pretty straight forward – i was given 3 customers with different types of transactions at a bank e.g. online, in a branch, on the phone etc and then how much each transaction cost the bank and how much fees they received per transaction. It was then basic mathematics to figure out the net profit/loss of each customer. The way it worked out the most profitable customer used online methods more than branch transactions.

The final question was the CEO thinks that because of this, he should close down all his branches and focus on technological options. Do you agree? Why/Why not? What would you recommend. I went on about how i disagree because branch networks serve an important customer relations role and that i would focus investment on the technological options so that it is completely seamless so it becomes the customers choice and as demand for branch networks decreases then i would look to close them down based on geographical considerations and how busy they were.

And that's essentially what my case study day was.. :)