Schaumburg Holdings India -

HR Consulting Simulation
Exercise



For Online Business Unit

Transformation

This HR consulting simulation exercise is prepared by Prof. Shrihari S Sohani of IIM Indore from
secondary sources and personal experience. This exercise may not represent a real business situation.
Company Background

SHI was established in December 2009 as a captive IT offshore development center for

Schaumburg Holdings Corporation (SHC), USA. Based at Pune and Bengaluru, SHI provides

information technology and business automation solutions to different business units of

Schaumburg Holdings Corporation. SHI supports Online Business (OBU) one of the critical units

in SHC in addition to an Analytics & Market Place vertical. The support of OBU requires a

massive IT backbone that has required redundancy and follows graceful degradation in case of

a system outage. The mandate of SHI is also to provide sophisticated analysis support to the

OBU. Since its establishment, SHI had evolved from a captive center established with the aim to

replace expensive vendors and vendor personnel in USA and thereby reduce IT costs, to a

successful business case for SHC. However, the venture was not without its teething troubles.

Overcoming all odds, SHI not only became successful, but is also seen as a top IT captive

operating in India.

For the parent, SHI had delivered significant IT cost savings, reduced its dependence on vendors,

developed in-house talent and built/ retained intellectual properties in terms of unique processes

and patents.

Organization culture

SHI’s organization culture was built around SHC’s tag line of primacy of members (as loyal

customers are referred) who shop in its stores. The basic tenants of the culture pertain to

ownership, learning and innovation, embracing feedback for improving services and to work hard

to earn trust. SHC strives to attain operational excellence to drive results that are profitable and
sustainable, while delivering a ‘wow’ experience to the members. The culture encourages

associates to embrace best of technology and be amenable to constant change. SHI, the captive

IT arm of SHI, aspires to support the parent’s dream to become the world’s greatest integrated

retailer.

The Required Transformation:

With time most of the global retailers have looked at analytics and big data for finetuning their

inventory and application if discounts. SHI still was relying on traditional IT applications that

calculated discount once in two days based on the units available in the inventory and the

expected new arrivals. Currently the skill stack in the unit is fine tuned to work on legacy

applications. As defined by Gartner, a legacy application is “an information system that may be

based on outdated technologies, but is critical to day-to-day operations.” Several examples of

such legacy systems can be found across some major organizations. They use legacy

applications running on an obsolete mainframe for core business operations such as high-

volume data processing. Fine-tuned over the years, these systems are adapted to deliver

specific functionality.

SHI must transform itself so that it does not expose itself to lost opportunities. SHI has decided

to transform its Online business unit. SHI has decided to convert its OBU into a unit that will

manage the initiatives on big data and analytics. Such initiatives will allow its parent firm to

bring down the cycle time for declaring discounts on its products from one week to twice daily.

This phenomenal flexibility will allow SHC to manage its inventory on real time basis and move

its products much more swiftly than its competitors.

The Consulting Challenge:

SHI has an employee strength of 1600. The employee strength of the online business unit is

1000. They are working on various skills such as Java, Oracle and some other database legacy

applications for inventory management. The employees working in this unit are an asset to the

organization as they have complete knowledge of the organization, its legacy systems, and the

domain. The challenge is to transform these employees working on traditional systems to new

skill stack of Apache Hadoop for big data and on one standard data visualisation tool. Data

visualization is the graphical representation of information and data. By using visual elements

like charts, graphs, and maps, data visualization tools provide an accessible way to see and

understand trends, outliers, and patterns in data. In the world of Big Data, data visualization

tools and technologies are essential to analyze massive amounts of information and make data-

driven decisions.

Terms of Reference: The consultant must

• provide a complete road map of how this transformation of employees will get
executed.

• the time required for this transformation. It is to be noted that there should be no
impact on current support activities for SHC business.

• provide in detail all the assumptions made while suggesting the road map.

• provide all the cost elements and an estimate of the same.