Since the October kick-off meeting, the group of seven students had worked very hard to meet the deadline and present their recommendation on “How to make Solvay's guar programme more robust and eventually self-sustainable?” on the 18th of January.
Final step for the MBA in IM students
The ESCP MBA in IM programme* offers the opportunity to learn about business reality and professional behaviour in an international and multicultural context.
This oral defense stressed out again how much a key element of the MBA in IM programme the Company Consultancy Project (CCP) is. The companies’ expectations are high for this 3-month consulting assignment.
To achieve their mission, students met Solvay representatives on a regular basis to design a business model for Solvay’s Sutstainable Guar Initiative, which aims to empower farmers with tools and knowledge to cultivate the crop through good agricultural practices, resulting in more continuous, high yield production. Students elaborated their recommendations through a strategic approach in terms of resources, customers segments, price analysis etc., bearing in mind the major goal for Solvay: the social impact of the guar programme (farming optimization, improvement of the farmers’ livelihood, etc.).
José ANAYA ARANDA, Marie-Hélène GEERIS, Javier JESUS MEJA, Anna KOUZOVLEVA, Anthony LE VIAVANT, Andrea SALAZAR YARHI and Manuel TORAL LOPEZ did a great job, getting an enthusiastic feedback from Lamia NARCISSE, Sustainability Director at Solvay Novecare and sponsor of this CPP.
“Brilliant” was the first word pronounced by Lamia Narcisse, who found the students’ work very impressive.
“It is an impactful job that has been done in a few months. It was great to see you really got involved and you succeeded in clarifying a lot of things. I will definitively use the concrete outcomes you brought in. You put me in contact with different people very useful for the project. And today, I can say I’m sad it is already finished!”
Students were asked to describe the experience. 3 words to sum up: “Learning - Gratifying – Intense”.
"Indeed, what we enjoyed the most was the opportunity to participate in a social project with a lot of potential to increase people’s livelihood and make a real difference, while working in a learning environment with the constant support and help of our tutor and the client.
We also really enjoyed to be completely part of the project, with a real involvement in gathering information and data, and meeting contacts. We got the chance to express our opinion freely on the issues raised by Solvay. Transparency and collaboration with our client in the whole process of the mission was something we really appreciated.
One of the most difficult parts of the mission was to manage the schedule between consultancy project tasks, and the rest of the MBA programme. 3-4 months may sound like a lot of time, but taking into account that we had to adapt to the different backgrounds, nationalities and ways of working with a group of 7 persons, including all the projects and assignments, the time actually started to become very scarce. But in the end, we were very proud of the work done.
We learnt a lot from the Company Project’s process! We learnt how to work more efficientlty as a team, with delays and client feedback. It helped us to improve how to structure projects overall, from team collaboration to time management and work structure.”
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