Airplane De-Icing

Case Study Prompt

Your client is AirCo, a U.S. airline that has significant operations at one of the Chicago airports.

Due to the cold weather, the client’s planes often have to be de-iced, but because the need for de-icing is very unpredictable, the client decided to outsource the de-icing to IceCo last year. However, IceCo’s performance has not been satisfactory.

The client is considering in-sourcing airplane de-icing, but currently does not have enough resources to do the de-icing in-house.

The client requires a 4-year payback on investments and wants to know if they should in-source or outsource the de-icing?

Case Study Overview

Your client is an airline that is facing unsatisfactory performance from one of its vendors and is considering in-sourcing the vendor’s work. In this Bain case study, you need to dig into the different scenarios and find a high-ROI solution for your client.

We recommend that you use the Profitability Framework to solve this case study, but stay flexible in your structuring approach and allow yourself to work outside of the framework.

This case has several math exhibits. It will test your comfort level with reading and interpreting data from charts and graphs. The qualitative difficulty is 3 out of 4. This is a mid-level interview you could expect to see in a Bain first round.

Bain Interview Tips

What does Bain seek its candidates? Quite simply, it’s practicality.

In this case, build out your structure into work-streams that you as a Manager at Bain would be comfortable assigning out to a team of analysts.

In this case, focus on timing – 2min to build a structure, 2min to present it, 5min for math, 2min for brainstorming, and 2min for a conclusion.

For out-loud practice with an expert, book an hour with an ex-MBB coach.

This is only one of many different case study examples from the Case Library!