ACE Challenge 2015

Amazon Confidential

Preliminary Round: ACE Case Breakers
Case Study: Operations
Introduction
It is a bright autumn morning in 2205 and Gaurav Maurya, SVP – Amazon Enceladus1, is gazing outside the window and reminiscing about how Blue Origin2 had transformed Enceladus into a bustling human colony in a short span of 50 years, much like some of the developing countries back on Earth. Also, continuing
Amazon’s legacy, Amazon.en has become Enceladus’s most customer-centric company in a short span of one year and customers love to buy all sorts of products on it every day. Gaurav is scheduled to meet the
Board of Directors back on Earth in 3 days to present the first year report. For this meeting, Gaurav has decided to focus on operations, and on how different verticals within operations are helping raise the bar on customer experience. Gaurav enlisted four of his team members to share their stories.
As Gaurav prepares for the meeting, he has asked you to take a look at the reports that his team has put together and help him answer some open questions and come up with fresh ideas on how to solve the problems. Scenario 1:
Like on Earth, Amazon’s goal is to offer Enceladus’ largest selection on Amazon.en. Deonn, who recently joined Amazon.en wants to accelerate the addition of new products in the catalogue. While Amazon already provides tools for vendors to submit their items in the catalogue, the error rate remains high. On an average, vendors fail to create 15 products for every 100 products submitted. This is a huge opportunity miss for
Amazon, especially since the plan is to add ~20 million items by the end of next year. Assume that each item generates ENC₹ 15 in revenue each year.
Deonn wants to launch a service offering for Amazon’s premium vendors and her goal is to reduce the error rate to 2%. Additional benefit due to