IBM Technical Contest Final Round

Engineer 2010
Please Select One of the Following Case Studies and prepare a Presentation on
your approach to the solution.

Case Study 1
Income tax department
Income tax department has undertaken the initiative of digitizing all the police record,
specifically the tax payers’ record, so that they can be searched, integrated and provides valuable
insight into the tax system. Some of the records have been converted at departmental level,
though all these records are not yet integrated. Also it has been found that there are some
fraudulent tax payers who are not paying the tax right and have been doing this since many
years. It was also found that in many cases there exists some kind of relationship among these
people like members of same family or friends. To get these useful insights, the IT department
wants to merge the individual department level systems into a master system. The challenges
being faced are:
• Merging these individual systems into master system of records, as there may be
duplicate records and also the scheme used by the different systems are following
different schemas
• Huge amount of data makes it impossible to do this task manually
• Determining the frauds and the inter-relationship
• Also, the government does not want to have a single point of failure and hence wants to
set up secondary system of records. This means that the secondary system should be
almost as same as the primary one at any point of time.
Come up with an implementation approach for the same.

Case Study 2
Return on Investment in Online Advertising
ABR (P) Ltd, a leading manufacturer of fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) supplies and
markets several consumer products. It has come up with a new product that has already existing
competitors. To popularize the product, the company wants to use online advertising as a
medium. This involves putting sponsored links on the search engines that appear at the top and
bottom of each search page. The links to be displayed are decided by a third-party vendor that
displays these links on various search engines and it gets paid whenever the user clicks on those
links instead of the actual search term. The link being displayed is decided on the bidding system
where each company bids for their place in the search-engine. Higher the bid better will be the
position of the sponsored-link. The company pays only for number of clicks on the link. For eg.:
If the sponsored link appeared 100 times in the search engine but got clicked only 5 times, then
the company pays only for those 5 times.
The objective here is to maximize the return on investment (ROI) of each search term bought by
ABR from the vendor. In addition, the focus is also on maximizing the revenue subject to fixed
spends per week for each search-term bidding. The company has an internal campaign tracking
system (CMS) that provides analytical information about the ads and campaigns.
Challenges faced by the company include:
• How to track performance of each search term on periodic basis?
• Which search terms to keep and which to get rid off?
 • Which new search terms to buy?
• How to maximize user experience of each search term?

Case Study 3
Price optimization in grocery store
Freshilia is a retail-chain of grocery. The business has become static and in order to improve the
profit margins, the company wants to identify ways that will improve the profitability of the
company and the same time retain the existing customers and bring in new customers. But
retailers have limited option for influencing shopper behavior. Retailers can influence through
price, advertising, in-store location and assortment. Of all these mediums, it is found that price
elasticity is 20 times higher than advertising elasticity (Lambin, 1976). But selecting pricing for
50000 products in not trivial, as it has been found that already the products being sold by the
retailers are heavily discounted and if the discount is raised little also the customer impact is seen
immediately in term of shift from one product to the other. This is product interaction. Also the
company needs to find the “loss leaders”. These are products like milk, curd, etc. They are called
so because they are heavily discounted, common and easily comparable between retailers.

Challenge at hand:
An attempt to develop a large-scale and comprehensive approach to price optimization that
includes product interactions.