Zhongyou Mobile Application Project
On Apr.22th 2013, the team successfully presented mid-term report to ZhongYou company. The report mainly consists of four part, including summary of the user experience by using app of top ten main competitors' app, analysis on these ten players' product and market strategy, marketing research work such as survey paper and focus group, innovative app enlightment reference.
At the end of the report, the team also present that they would further increase and strengthen communications with the company to deepen our understanding of the industry and help the data mining to provide the company a most helpful suggestion and solution.
This interim report has been fully affirmed and praised by GM of company Mr. Bian, general director Ge Lei and so on.
Zhongyou Marriage Service PlatformProject
On May 2, under the leadership of Prof. Xu Yunjie and teacher HUANG Xuan, the group went to ZhongYou company for the mid-term review. The general manager Bian, Director Fu, Director Ge and other employees from zhongyou participated in this meeting.
The mid-term reporting process lasted nearly 2 hours, at very beginning, the group members separately made the report about the marriage platform/Prenatal and postnatal care project and the health care project which integrated with their core business gene inspection. And then they gave the students feedback ,which involved the basic situation of the gene inspection industry, the latest industry development, the trend and the most difficult problems they faced with regarding how to realize low cost marketing, how to build the complete industry chain surrounding gene inspection etc. Mr Bian, the general manager expressed his ideas of strategic layout of this industry. Prof Xu and Bian deeply exchange their thoughts about how to realize their strategy by building the platform. Finally, the student determined the direction of latter half work ------build the platform which can seamlessly bridge the mainstream marriage website combining with resource advantages that zhongyou have.
Guo Sheng Project
On March 24，the Team has finished the iLab consulting project: Guo Sheng evaluation system. All of the team members of team 9 and team 10, professor Xu on behalf of the school and Manager Yangye on behalf of the company respectively are present, Maggie Huang from MBA program and Director Zhang from the company also joined in the conference.
Guosheng is a state owned company of SASAC with 5 divisions and hundreds of subsidiaries. The project goal of 2 teams is to build an evaluating system for all the company’s subsidiaries, and assess their performance of the last year. After 2 months’ hard work, discussion for several times, guided by the mentors they separate the subsidiaries into 3 main industries and get through the assessment by the particular finance ratios.
These 2 months’ work provide the students direct imaginations of how the company runs the business. The project also provide them a chance which they could use the knowledge learn from the class to fix the problems. The experience of carrying on the project also make students understand the knowledge better.
Life Care Project
On 22nd April 2013, the mid-term review of LifeCare iLab project was conducted in Wuxi where one of the biggest nursing institutions for the aged that are managed by LifeCare is located at. All five members of the project team including Lynn Hu, Jessica Wang, Chris Sun, Stefani Chen and Lanco Li together with the project mentor Prof. Zhang Zhe joined from the Fudan side. Mr. Ken Wang, the founder and GM of LifeCare, and Mr. Zhang Jianhua, Deputy GM of LifeCare participated in the review meeting from the client side.
It has been three months after the kick-off meeting of the LifeCare iLab project on January 17th. During this period of time, the team had carried out three meetings and interviews with the client company, visited two nursing institutions and studied various materials regarding the aged care industry from both domestic and global. Through these activities, the team who were all laymen to aged care industry are able to get to know this industry quickly, conducted relevant analysis and research and eventually come up with own business insights.
In the mid-term review, the team presented the preliminary research results of LifeCare’s new business model for the chain nursing institutions including the following aspects: external environment covering macro-economy, industry and major competitors, target customer drawn out from interviews with potential customers, key internal resources that matching the chain concept, strategy choosing based on the competitive advantages and shortcomings, and financial analysis including cost, profit and further investment. The two executives from LifeCare recognized the deliveries of the team on this primary stage and gave their inputs on certain parts of the report. In addition, the executives also led the team to visit around the Wuxi nursing institution and shared further information and ideas.
Through this review, the team is able to further verify the research direction of the new business model and understand the drawbacks in current research. More specific study and analysis on the execution of the business model in 5 years’ period will be conducted in next step.
Ten- thousand Desk Plan Project
Ten thousand desk Plan Project was created to help students who are in poor area of China with. It is a philanthropic project and it is an entrepreneuring project as well. These 2 features make it unique among the ilab projects in this term of IMBA.
This project was planned to have 3 working phases at the very beginning: school selection, sample desk manufacturing, fund raising. During the 1 half of the project, the group members discussed and practised a lot in order to push the project forward. Though they have met with a lot of challenges, like the schools are hard to be found, the reply of the local government are negative and passive, the communicating barrier within the group. But the members of the group have all realized that the challenges are must in such an significant and innovative project, they have overcome most of the difficulties and have make a big achievement up to now. Whenever they thought about the students in the poor schools are using the new desks designed and supplied by them, they are feeling extremely excited and seem to be more energetic and courageous.
In the next half of the project, the project group will be focusing more on the practice. They are planning to walk out of the campus to have interview with the students in poor schools already selected by them. They are also going to distribute the questionaires and collect enough information to make the desk design. They have so much confidence to have an excellent achievement in this project and have more and more students eventually benefit from their hard work.
IBM Pure System Project
IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation branched in Beijing, China. IBM manufacturers and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from main frame computers to nanotechnology.
This project involves an analysis of the competitors’ marketing strategy of the similar products to pure system, that is the new cloud database and huge potentially demanded. All the works come to answer three questions: 1. How do the competitors invest on their product? 2. What’re the successful cases classified by the industries? 3. What’re the marketing innovations of the competitors? IBM marketing sector shows solicitude for these questions and requires the team to report before April that is half time of previous anticipate.
This is the second-year of Fudan’s collaboration with IBM in iLab program. The team members come from IT, finance, auto, trading, education industries with multiple backgrounds.
Since the kickoff meeting on Jan 16th, every week the team takes meetings with IBM’s coordinator reviewing the data sources and insights based on desk research. New comments and requirements have been proposed and resolved under the effective communication and quantitative analysis. The most difficult challenge is to analysis the investment of R&D on the target products out of the whole company that is thought as top secret. After wide range of material collection, analysis and summarize, and consulting from the related experts, the team has had a deep understanding of the marketing strategies of the six competitors, especially ORACLE, SAP, EMC. Thus many suggestions for IBM are released based on the solid data.
The final presentation had been completed in the IBM office before the deadline. Its report won satisfaction and praise of IBM project leader. The key values that we have earned from this project are: 1. Methodology of marketing research; 2. Overall market and competing structure of cloud data servers; 3. Teamwork spirit in managing the project against timing plan.
IBM Market Expansion Project
The primary goal of IBM market expansion projectis to enhance the growth of IBM’s market in China by finding industry insights through research of key clients in the financial and telecommunications market. To enhance the primary goal, the team will alsoconduct benchmark analysis of local companies’ performance in comparison to their global counterparts (e.g. Petro China vs. BP/SHELL).
By the midterm review,the team has conducted focused target segmentation of large Chinese financial and telecommunication institutions through the use of the Eagle Eye Program in order to track various industry keywords ,which can help IBM gain further insight and knowledge as to how to increase their penetration of the market. This penetration can be done through analysis of current financial news and trying to predict upcoming trends that IBM can capitalize on by offering new or enhanced services to their key clients in the financial and telecommunications market.
The members have also completed company profiles on both Shell and BP, as well as a brief financial benchmark analysis with the two companies and Petro China.
On the midterm review with IBM corporate mentor and Fudan faculty mentor, the team showed and introduced the work they’ve been done.
(Team member: Joyce, Echo, SHIN MIJEO, Robbie, Max, and Jeffrey)
Chai Tai Food Project
On April 23rd in Room 601 of Starring Building, Chai Tai Food iLab project team was honored to give a Mid-term presentation to Mr. FANG Jingsong. Team reviewed the schedule of the project, analyzed the market demand of kitchen food, summarized consumers’ buying behavior, and proposed some concepts of gift set of CP food.
Mr. Fang was quite satisfied with the presentation and has thanked for our efforts for the project during the past four months. Meanwhile, he made some comments on the market demand and brand exposure and proposed his own view on “bird flu” which was the most sensitive event recently. In addition, he identified several topics which should be proposed in the final presentation. More importantly, he mentioned that the new gift set needed to be sold in the real market, which will be a real challenge for us. But on the other hand, it will be also a good opportunity to test our real capability to conduct marketing management.
After the formal meeting, the team took this opportunity to have a free talk with other employees from CT Food Group so that students could get first-hand information of sales situation and marketing strategies inside the company. CT Food Group has already planned to build a new channel to sell its products and provided services to consumers. It has also improved its capability to provide pork to the end market so that consumers would have wider range of choice of CP food.
Exxon Mobile Project
With the rapid development of Chinese economy, more and more multi-national corporations enter China, and bring their outstanding products in Chinese market. However, after they make huge profit, they find it difficult to transfer the money to their parent company, which is also called trapped cash, due to Chinese statutory regulation. As a result, it actually influences their investment decision in reality; therefore the mission of our project is to evaluate this effect on investment decision and provide the future trend.
The team member includes Shi Rui, Ning Jing, Gao Xiaofeng, Li Qiang and Mei Ying, and Professor Xu Haoping is the mentor. After nearly two months of careful preparation and survey, team had the mid-term review meeting with Max Yang and Annie Wang from Exxon Mobil on the afternoon of Apr 26th. The mid-term review offers the team a clear road in the next step.
The presentation comprises of two parts, trapped cash and RMB internationalization. At the beginning, students showed them influence of trapped cash and how to solve this problem, and then established a module to evaluate its effect on investment decision. Then, another team member Li Qiang presented the time line and meaning of RMB internationalization and our interview with banks. Finally, Max gave the team his opinion about the presentation.
NBTY Project
On the morning of April 23rd ,the NBTY iLab project team gave a Mid-term presentation to Prof .Zhang Zhe . After External Analysis (using PEST) and Internal Analysis, the group has moved into the Customer Analysis section of the project. Their first move was to create a focus group, in order to obtain some consumer insights on China’s baby vitamin market. Main findings from this were that aside from Safety, parents concerns were that the vitamins were easy to administer and easy for children to take. Additionally, that the primary decision maker in the households were mostly women. Using these insights, the group created an offline and online questionnaire that they were able to obtain 76 responses for.
Feedback from Professor Zhang was quite positive. After giving students some suggestions on a couple of slides in order to make our data research clearer to the audience, as well as some aspects of our data mining that we hadn’t thought to add to our presentation, Professor Zhang recommend that going forward, the team should make sure that proper thought was given to future strategy suggestions and Opportunity Analysis. Overall, Professor Zhang was quite pleased with the work.
