Detail Work Plan of British American Tobacco Bangladesh 'BOM' 10

Detail Work Plan of British American Tobacco Bangladesh ‘BOM’ 10

British American Tobacco Bangladesh, one of the leading multinational companies in the country, once again hosted the annual Battle of Minds to universities around Bangladesh.

BAT Bangladesh introduced Battle of Minds (BOM), the most prestigious business case solution competition for university students, in 2004, soon making the event a legacy of British American Tobacco all around the world.

Battle of Minds aims to provide young aspiring future leaders with a platform to showcase their entrepreneurial expertise in front of a panel of judges. Apart from the spirit of competition, Battle of Minds gives participating students opportunities to take part in one of the most challenging recruitment programs offered by BAT Bangladesh. So far around 39 former participants in Battle of Minds have been recruited by BAT Bangladesh.

The Organization –

Introduction:

Staring form 1954 in Chittagong, after that 1965 in Dhaka British American Tobacco Bangladesh has been playing as a leading company in tobacco industry in our country and a proud member of British American Tobacco plc. Always concentrated on quality & customer satisfaction BATB has been fulfilling the demand of world class cigarette in this region.

Always influenced by the slogan “Think Biggest” BATB has practiced its every operation by a selection of best qualified employees. Including that the company always tries to provide the best work environment and the biggest learning opportunities. Also to produce the future leaders, to find out the best of the best BATB organizes Battle of Mind every year.

The internship report is on Battle of Minds ’10. It is one of the major and biggest event of the year. BATB is thought to be an ideal organization for the application of the knowledge that a graduate gains during his/her four years study period due to its most talented workforce in the region, work environment and business strategy. In addition, as BATB is a company with diversified challenges of tobacco manufacturing industry, a graduate can also apply various theories and can be innovative to get the work done. This report has been organized into three major separate sections. The first part covers the organization, second part is about the job and the third part is all about the project itself.

History:

British American Tobacco Bangladesh is a member of British American Tobacco plc that is based in UK and is one of the leading players in the global tobacco business. British American Tobacco plc is a market leader in more than 50 countries with 85,000 employees selling more than 300 brands in more than 180 markets worldwide. British American Tobacco Bangladesh, a market leader in the country, is a subsidiary of British American Tobacco plc and is one of the 66 countries in which British American Tobacco plc has manufacturing plants. The Company has operated in Bangladesh since per-independence and has its headquarters in Dhaka with a tobacco leaf processing operation in Kushtia. It is one of the oldest, largest and most respected multinational companies operating in Bangladesh.

British American Tobacco Bangladesh currently employs more than 1,300 people and provides indirect employment to a further 24,500 farmers, distributors and suppliers. The company started its journey as Imperial Tobacco Company Limited in 1910 in the then undivided India. After the partition of India, Pakistan Tobacco Company (PTC) was established in 1949 to reflect the new country and to meet the demand for cigarettes in the region. The first factory in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) was set up in Fauzdarhat area of Chittagong in 1954. The second factory was set up in 1965 in Dhaka. After the independence of the country, Bangladesh Tobacco Company Limited (BTC) was incorporated on 2 February 1972 as a private limited company. Since then it has been the market leader in the country. In 1990 the Chittagong Factory was closed and in 1995 a Green Leaf Threshing Plant (GLTP) was set up in Kushtia.

Currently, British American Tobacco Bangladesh has two factories in Bangladesh. The Cigarette Manufacturing Factory (Dhaka Factory) is located on the same premises as the Head Office in Mohakhali, Dhaka. The Green Leaf Threshing Plant (GLTP) is situated in Kushtia. In line with the global identity change of British American Tobacco plc, BTC was renamed as British American Tobacco Bangladesh Company Limited (BATB) in 1998. The Company is listed on both the Dhaka and Chittagong stock exchanges in the country.

Product offerings:

The success of British American Tobacco Bangladesh comes from satisfying smokers. They manufacture and market high quality and well established international cigarette brands. The brand portfolio of BATB currently consists of Benson & Hedges, John Player, Glod Leaf, Pall Mall, Captain, Star, Scissors, Pilot and Bristol.

Visions for the future:

The Vision that motivates people and drives the business of BATB is “to extend our leadership through World Class performance” BAT has a plan to build their business in three ways:

Organic growth in their existing markets
Quick and effective entry into new markets
Potentially attractive acquisition, joint ventures or other strategic alliances

Project Summary:

Achievement, recognition, empowerment, leadership and challenge are the prime pillars of BATB employees. They are in constant search for talents who can Bring Difference in the organization. With that quest in mind they launched Battle of minds, the hunt for future leaders of BATB.

It is their attempt to reach out to the deepest corner of the country to look for worthy students. Since 2004, BAT Bangladesh has recruited 49 talented managers from various leading universities through Battle of Minds.

At present, Battle of Minds is one of the most prestigious and widely awaited inter-University competitions in the country. The company wishes to establish itself as a responsible corporate citizen and as a part of that responsibility the company aims at reinforcing itself as a development partner of the country.

British American Tobacco Bangladesh recognizes the importance of managerial skill development of the young generation of Bangladesh for harnessing future economic growth opportunities.

A key outcome of Battle of Minds is Bridging the gap between corporate bodies and educational institutes. Universities across the nation send their best students to participate in Battle of Minds. It is also a platform for highlighting talented individuals and harnessing their competitive spirit and entrepreneurial acumen to generate business oriented ideas. Such direct competition against each other enables the potential graduates to get prepared for the extremely competitive job markets, while Universities also get an opportunity to judge their graduates’ standards against other universities. British American Tobacco Bangladesh is the host due to its commitment towards development of business talent.

In practical terms, Battle of Minds gives all its applicants and participants a scope to identify their own strengths and weaknesses, a foundational understanding which is required across organizations.

A total of 16 universities have participated in the year 2010, with Business, Agricultural and Engineering final year students. Application window for Battle of Minds 2010 was open where participants can log into www.bdjobs.com/batb and apply online. After the application closed on November 10, Battle of Minds visited the nationwide campuses starting from November 25, followed by a Grand Finale of the competition which took place between 19-21 December.

Institute of Business Administration, University of Dhaka won the title consistently from 2004-2006 followed by Khulna University on 2007, BRAC University in 2008 and North South University in 2009. As the competition stepped into its seventh year in 2010, the challenge for all the universities just got bigger and Dhaka University Finance team took the crown this time with their outstanding business plan on the tourism sector of Bangladesh.

Objective of the project:

Primary objective: The primary objective of this project is to showcase the way Battle of Minds ’10 was staged into different phases with the support of the BATB itself and external agencies.

Specific objective:

To provide brief idea on British American Tobacco Bangladesh.
Detail work plan of BATB’s BOM ’10 which is one of their main source of manpower recruiting strategy.
Stages of execution of BOM ’10.

Methodology:

Formal Evaluation Studies: This is a evaluation studies that assess the extent of implementation and impact of BOM ‘10. Evaluation studies tend to focus on specific contexts of particular projects with no attempt to generalize beyond the cases at hand.

Main Body –

Battle of Minds is BAT Bangladesh’s flagship event to bring the national talent pool together for development. Battle of Minds, a competition of business case presentations, started in 2004 with the participation of 5 business schools. This year, the competition saw the participation of 18 teams from 16 universities. The event was divided into 4 different phases. These phases are as follows;

Pre BOM phase
Road Show
Semi Final round
Final Round

Pre BOM phase: The show started with the approval of BATB Top 10 Team at 1st of October. When the members from top team gave the HR Team a go ahead call on the launching of one of the biggest event of BATB’s yearly calender. So the HR Team prepared BOM ’10 team for planning and executing the event properly.

Once the official BOM ’10 team was formed and event planing was done, external agencies were called upon for a meeting so that everyone remains on the same page and every plan is discussed with specific detail. External Agency list:

UNYSAB Bangladesh: UNYSAB was the strategic partner of the event. They provided all the ground support for the event’s marketing, university engagement and voluntary support.

Ogilvy & Mather Communications: All kind of event management support provider for the event including logistic and creative work.

BDJobs24.com: Participants registered their name for the event through the help of their online facility. They provided database management support.

HR Kites: Worked as Corporate grooming provider during BOM ’10 Road show.

MR Enterprise: Provided complete transpiration solution to the event.

Star Campus: Worked as the only Media Partner of the event.

EnRoute: They did the preliminary CV screening for the Road show Phase of BOM ’10.

Once the work were distributed among the external parties. 1st step towards execution started with the print media advertisement through The Daily Star. And at the same time Chairpersons, Faculty members from top business school and BATB officials were invited at Hotel Radison on a corporate dinner session where they were briefed in detail about the upcoming event. That was the official launching of the event on public.

Once the promotional activities started into the universities we started receiving applications through bd jobs. To encourage more participation we visited the universities for the second time and followed up the activities and keep the in charge’s posted on the progress. On the other side I kept recording progress reports on the event and presented those during meetings with the BATB Team for further improvement and bringing required changes in the plan.

Once the required changes were approved I had to arrange meeting with the concern external partner for implementing the change. And continuous follow up on the issue to make sure that its taken care off.

Finally our work paid off. We received 1600+ application from 16 universities covering different disciplines. Then applications were assessed with the requirements of the event and 210 applicants were selected for the 1st round of the competition.

Roadshow: Once we selected the candidates for the road show round we started our journey towards universities to launch our Road show round. This round started at 26th of November with IBA and ended at 9th of December with the combined grooming session at Hotel Lake Shore. Lets see how the Road show round worked.

We went to each participating university along with officials from the BATB, one alumni member from that university who is currently working in BATB, assessors and the members of BOM ’10 team to execute the event. Ogilvy used to do the venue setup for the event as per our requirement. Event flow of a road show as follows;

UNYSAB makes sure all the selected participants from the particular university is present in the venue also room is packed with audience.
Once we the members of BATB team reaches the venue we invited the chairperson to announce the opening of the road show.
One of the BATB official will give a briefing on the event flow for the day to the audience.
Alumni member will take the stage for 1 hour and he will share his life at BATB with 2 different video presentations on BATB.
At the end of his speech he will disclose the names of the selected participants for the round and other than selected participant everyone else will leave the venue.
HR Kites will take the stage for next 3 hours, where they will groom the participants on the corporate culture and will share the secret behind winning the race.
By the time grooming is done 3-5 assessment booths will be ready to assess the individual performance of the participants and to select a team of 4 from that university who will battle for their university on the next round.
For the assessment part one participant used to get a real life business problem case. He had 15 minutes for going through the case and an additional 10 minutes for preparing himself for facing the assessor with his solution. The assessor will judge him based on his findings from the case.
By rotation every selected participant will go through the same process and once all the participants are done with the assessment one of the
BATB official declared the end of the road show at the venue.
We will leave the venue with the assessment papers for office. An BOM ’10 Assessment Form has been given in Appendix. See Appendix 1.0.
Through this process we visited 16 universities in total. Once done with the road show we sat for a meeting in office and finalized one team from each university who will represent their university in the next round. And sent the finalists name to the Chairperson of that university to announce the names in the university. Also we called each of the selected member personally to greet them and let them know about the coming event flow of next round.

Semifinal Round: This is the round where participants represented their university as a team. So the battle went to a new level which they will fight as a team not individuals. For this round groups were called in for a briefing session at Hotel Serina conference room at 11th December 2010. They received the case that they needs to solve for this round and each team received BDT10000 for preparing their materials for presentation. This year the problem was to “Tourism Industry in Bangladesh”. For this they needed to form a tour operator company, prepare their detail plans of execution, develop tour packages, marketing strategy to reach the target group, promotion material, channel of promotion, show strong financial return to ensure support from financial institutes etc. For preparing the complete plan they were given 7 days and they were due with the presentation at 19th of December 2010. At 19th the event was held at BATB head office. 17 teams faced a judge panel of 5 BATB Top Team members where participating teams showed their plans of developing and prompting tourism sector to the local people. End of the day 6 teams impressed judge panels which gave them the green signal for the Final round. The final round was to held at 21st of December where teams will take their plan to the global market to attract the foreign tourists in the local tourism sector.

Final Round: BOM involved teams consisting of four undergraduate students selected by a panel of judges (Kazi Wahidul Alam, Editor, Bangladesh Monitor; Zaid Amin, Vice President, Corporate Banking, CitiBank N.A; Inam Ahmed, Deputy Editor, The Daily Star and Syed Imtiaz Faruque, Head of HR, British American Tobacco, Bangladesh (BATB) for the year 2010) who competed against teams from other premier schools. The Final Round of the competition had six teams (Institute of Business Administration, Team 1; Institute of Business Administration, Team 2; North South University, Khulna University, Department of Finance, University of Dhaka; Department of Marketing, University of Dhaka) worked under pressure to solve a real business problem, using simulated business conditions such as strict deadline requirements to analyze, explore and formulate action-oriented solutions. Their recommendations were presented to the judges who evaluated them in terms of theoretical knowledge of a case study and then draw on their experience outside the classroom.

Each team had twenty minutes to present their case analysis and recommendations from a required written overview. All team members were expected to actively participate in the presentation phase, which is followed by a question and answer period. Judges based their decisions on such criteria as the depth and comprehensiveness of analysis, relevance, originality, persuasiveness and overall presentation.

This year DU Finance took the crown with their outstanding development plan and strong financial, North South came 1st runner up and IBA became 2^nd runner up.

Analysis:

SWOT analysis of Battle of Minds ’10:

Strength:

Pioneer and biggest competition for the undergraduate students.
Organized by one of the leading corporate house in Bangladesh.
Covers top most universities in Bangladesh.
Main source of recruiting fresh graduates.

Weakness:

Managers responsible for the event pays less attention to the event due to heavy work load.
Managing assessors for road shows is never easy task.

Opportunities:

Can cover more Universities to reach more talents across the nation

Threats:

Competitors like Uniliver and Nestle has started similar type of competition for their own recruitment too.
Might lost the craze of the event if fails to keep holding the premium exposure.

Critical observations:

Biggest platform for the students of the nation to expose themselves to the potential employer and world.

The event is highly appreciated among the University authority and students.

Its a real time opportunity for the students to look through the window of a corporate house being a student and learn his or her future life.

Students are passionate about having a chance to be a part of the event and get a entry on the BATB corporate life.

A portion of the students thinks there are no use of such a competition as there are other options to start their career. So they are not willing to participate in such a program.

Managers remains heavily work loaded and it’s difficult to engage them in executing such a big event.

External agencies never gets proper attention. They works in a slave master situation. As from BATB’s end they think we are paying you with good money so go as per me.

University authority asks for unethical favor to earn a bit of name of their own.

Due to government ban on tobacco marketing one of the biggest challenge for BATB is to reach student through a very narrow scope of channel.

Recommendations:

More universities should be brought under the umbrella of Battle of
Minds to give more student a platform to the corporate world.
Managers in the team of BOM should be given less projects to make sure that they can give their maximum to make the event a successful one and also communicate with the society that they are a socially responsible organization for talent development.

Conclusion:

This year, a large number of undergraduate students from the Faculty of Business, Economics, Social Sciences and Arts and also Environmental Sciences had been invited to participate in a national case study competition, Battle of Minds (BOM). With the Battle of Minds, BATB discover innovation, creativity and passion amongst the young people, every year. It is evident that students have quite a big pool of talents. However, the challenge lies with BATB, as to how they can encourage these young people to make use of their knowledge and skills and channel them in the right direction. This way, not only will these young people be benefited, the country as a whole will also experience a new wave in terms of development in the fields of agriculture, technology, health, businesses, education and much more. Hopefully, this would reduce the brain-drain crisis in Bangladesh. It is time for the young minds to be more aware and work together, to make this country a better place for the future generation.