The challenges
Three domains. Three live problems.
Pick one domain when you register. Full problem statements are in the downloadable challenge brief — read all three before you decide.
Marketing
"Breaking out of the safety-shoe shadow."
Allen Cooper is widely recognised for industrial safety footwear. The brand also sells sports, casual and
formal footwear and apparel — but a large share of young consumers either don't know this range exists,
or associate the brand only with workwear. The category is crowded with large players spending heavily on
athletes, celebrities and influencer marketing.
The task:
Build a go-to-market and brand-positioning plan to establish Allen Cooper's non-safety footwear
range with consumers aged 18–30, over a 6-month horizon, on a lean budget (assume ₹15–20 lakh total
marketing spend, excluding product cost).
Your submission should cover:
Target consumer definition and insight — who exactly, and what belief must change.
Positioning statement and the brand story you would build the range on (does the safety legacy help or
hurt? justify your call).
Channel plan — where the money goes and why, split across digital, marketplace, offline and content.
A campaign idea with a name, key message and at least three creative executions described in words or
rough visuals.
How you would measure success — the 4–5 metrics you'd hold the plan accountable to.
Format: Maximum 10 slides or 6 pages. Assumptions must be stated clearly.
Human Resources
"Staffing the peak without losing the core."
Manufacturing and warehouse operations in a tier-2 city face two linked problems: high attrition among
floor-level and warehouse staff, and sharp seasonal demand spikes (festive and wedding season,
marketplace sale events) that require a 30–40% temporary workforce increase within weeks. Temporary
hiring is fast but inconsistent; permanent staff carry the training load and burn out.
The task:
Design a workforce strategy that covers both retention of core staff and reliable seasonal
scaling.
Your submission should cover:
Root-cause analysis of floor-level attrition — go beyond "low salary".
A retention and engagement framework, with at least four interventions that are realistic on a modest HR
budget.
A seasonal hiring model — sourcing channels, onboarding in under a week, and how quality is maintained.
A skills and training plan that makes temporary staff productive fast without overloading permanent
employees.
How you would measure whether it is working — with target numbers.
Format: Maximum 10 slides or 6 pages.
Operations
"The return nobody accounted for."
"The vendor who ships what suits him" had its returns-side twin: "The return nobody accounted for."
Three separate leaks compound on each other:
- The claim-window leak — vendor-fault returns not claimed within the portal's deadline (as covered above) → claim money lost outright.
- The reverse shipping cost leak — every return, regardless of who's at fault, costs freight to bring back. Portals often deduct this from the seller's payout automatically, but sellers frequently don't reconcile whether the deducted reverse-shipping fee matches the actual return, whether it was double-charged, whether a customer-fault return's shipping was wrongly billed to a claim-eligible bucket, or whether high-return-rate SKUs are silently eating margin through cumulative reverse freight nobody is tracking at SKU level.
- The stock management leak — once goods physically return to the warehouse, they sit in a "returns limbo": not yet QC'd, not yet decided (resalable / refurbish / scrap / return-to-vendor), and not back in sellable inventory. This creates (a) working capital stuck in unusable stock, (b) inventory mismatch between system-shown stock and actual sellable stock, (c) aging stock that becomes unsellable as season/trend changes, and (d) double handling cost when items sit un-triaged and have to be reinspected later.
Your submission should now cover:
- The commercial cost across all three leaks — quantify separately with stated assumptions:
- Lapsed/rejected claims (money lost to portal deadline miss)
- Reverse shipping cost — total spend, cost as % of return value, and cost concentration by SKU/category (which products have return rates high enough that reverse freight alone erodes margin)
- Stock-in-limbo cost — average days a returned unit sits un-triaged, working capital locked, and estimated write-off/markdown on aged returned stock
- A returns-processing scorecard — parameters, weightages, rating bands covering: claim timeliness, reverse-shipping cost accuracy/reconciliation rate, and turnaround time from return-GRN to triage decision (resalable/refurbish/scrap/RTV).
- A governance mechanism — escalation, penalties/incentives, repeat-failure consequences — now also covering hubs that let triage backlogs build up, not just claim delays.
- Process controls at point of return receipt — including a triage SLA (e.g., every return must be QC'd and bucketed within X hours/days of GRN) and a reverse-freight reconciliation check (system-billed vs actual courier charge, matched against return reason).
- A one-page dashboard showing weekly: claims raised vs lapsed, reverse-shipping cost trend by category, and returns-aging (days-in-limbo buckets: 0–3, 4–7, 8–15, 15+ days).
Format: Maximum 10 slides or 6 pages.
Your domain is locked at registration. Download the brief for full problem statements, format requirements and evaluation parameters.
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