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MuMart Mu Sigma Business Case

Mu Sigma is a leading provider of decision sciences and analytics solutions, helping companies institutionalize data-driven decision making. We work with market-leading companies across multiple verticals, solving high impact business problems in the areas of Marketing, Supply Chain and Risk analytics. For these clients we have built an integrated decision support ecosystem of people, processes, methodologies & proprietary IP and technology assets that serve as a platform for crosspollination and innovation. Mu Sigma has driven disruptive innovation in the analytics industry by integrating the disciplines of business, math, and technology in a sustainable model. With over 75 Fortune 500 clients and over 2000 decision science professionals we are one of the largest pure-play decision sciences and analytics companies.

MuMart Case Study

Background:
MuMart was founded by Mr. Bill Billiardson in 1983 in Great Bend, IN. From a small corner store selling local produce, over the last 30 years, MuMart has grown rapidly to become the convenience retailer of choice in the United States. MuMart now has over 3,000 stores spread in 47 states (it doesnt have a presence in Hawaii, Alaska and North Dakota) across the country. Historically, they have expanded through new store openings in rural, suburban and exurban centers. Their strategic focus area for the next three years is to expand into urban centers and large cities. While their strategy for suburban centers has typically been to carry a large assortment, due to limited real-estate availability and the costs associated with it, they need to relook at their assortment strategy. The Executive Leadership team at MuMart recently approved new store launches in three cities across the US. The three cities are Phoenix-AZ, Des Moines-IA and Atlantic City-NZ. The Real Estate Strategy team in conjunction with the Store Operations teams has determined that the new stores will have a total Mod space of 85,000 units. All shelves will be of uniform length of 100 units. The Customer Insights team has worked with a third party provider to map out every transaction in their database to a customer household using some scientific as well as approximate methods. MuMart would like to determine the right assortment strategy that can be carried out in these new stores to maximize both Reach as well as Revenue.

Deliverables Expected:
1. An executive presentation (PPT) with your recommendations and supporting evidence 2. Executable source code (as applicable) used to manipulate data and arrive at your recommendations (SAS/SPSS/R/Excel/Java/C/C++ are the only technologies allowed for this exercise) 3. Thorough documentation of the source code

Data Available:
1. Transaction History for the two years (2010 and 2011). A Representative subset (1M) of the total data is provided. For all practical purposes, you can assume that this is a complete database of transactions 2. Customer Database: A database of 120,000 households and their demographic traits 3. (Stock Keeping Unit) SKU Database: A database of 18000 SKU that are potential SKU for these markets

Assumptions:
1. The new stores are scheduled to open on January 1, 2013

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MuMart Case Study 2. MuMarts assortment decision is made independent of the competitions assortment strategy 3. There is a propensity for customers to walkaway completely from a transaction when a particular product is missing 4. The product prices will not change significantly in 2013, compared to 2010-2012 5. While seasonality is a factor, assortment decisions/changes for MuMart are made only on a quarterly basis (assume due to logistical challenges)

Disclaimer:
1. The client name, founders name, business problem and supporting data provided are all fictitious and have been created by Mu Sigma purely for the purpose of this contest 2. The dataset is programmatically created. While due care has been taken to make the data as realistic as possible, owing to the manner in which it is generated (using probability distributions), some of it might seem illogical. Please take the data at face value and accurate as is

Note:
Send your deliverable to mureka@mu-sigma.com as an attachment Do mention your username (that was created at the time of registration) in the mail Last date to send your submissions Jan 4th, 2013 Reach out to mureka@mu-sigma.com in case of any queries regarding the case study

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