Lufthansa Case Competition

On November 3, a few of my classmates and I joined together to form a case competition team. We were competing with other teams from SOM on a case presented by Lufthansa airlines. After a long weekend together, our team put together a great proposal and was chosen for the finals. This is where the story gets exciting. The finals were to be held on Long Island on November 17. If we were chosen as the grand prize winners, we would each receive round-trip airfare to Europe! So, we put in a great amount of time and effort going into the finals and were very prepared. Our presentation went great and we thought we were in good shape to win. However, that wasn't to be. We ended up finishing in second place by one point. It turns out that we had the best presentation and all of the judges wanted us to win, but we were missing a major component of the case requirement: revenue generated through the implementation of our recommendations. We couldn't believe because we considered this and decided that "if you can't do it right, don't do it at all." Our team couldn't do it right because we didn't have enough data available! With that said, our team learned a significant lesson and we walked away with a nice new suitcase.