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Dear International Data Analytics for Business Executives:
Please read the Data Analytics for Business case assigned for this Learning Module and please analyze and answer the Assignment(s) requested in this Case Analysis.
Finally, please answer all questions and sections of this Data Analytics for Business Case with great detail and step by step being extremely methodical and accurate in your answers. It is extremely important that for each question and section, you write the entire question and you label and/or place the appropriate headings and subheadings clearly for each part of the question and/or section.
Please address, analyze, and discuss in great detail and thoroughly support and explain the what’s, how’s, and why’s of each of your answers.
I expect high caliber Case Analysis Reports with top analyses and interesting insights!! If you have any questions, please let me know. I am here to help.
Case Analysis Background
Reference:
Business Analytics (2e). – James R. Evans.
Pearson 2013 – ISBN: 9780132950619.
33 The case scenario was based on Gateway Estate Lawn Equipment Co. Case Study, used for the 1997 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Examiner Training course. This material is in the public domain. The database, however, was developed by the author.
PLE, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, is a privately owned designer and producer of traditional lawn mowers used by homeowners. In the past 10 years, PLE has added another key product, a medium-size diesel power lawn tractor with front and rear power takeoffs, Class I three-point hitches, four-wheel drive, power steering, and full hydraulics. This equipment is built primarily for a niche market consisting of large estates, including golf and country clubs, resorts, private estates, city parks, large commercial complexes, lawn care service providers, private homeowners with five or more acres, and government (federal, state, and local) parks, building complexes, and military bases. PLE provides most of the products to dealerships, which, in turn, sell directly to end users. PLE employs 1,660 people worldwide. About half the workforce is based in St. Louis; the remainder is split among their manufacturing plants.
In the United States, the focus of sales is on the eastern seaboard, California, the Southeast, and the south central states, which have the greatest concentration of customers. Outside the United States, PLE’s sales include a European market, a growing South American market, and developing markets in the Pacific Rim and China. The market is cyclical, but the different products and regions balance some of this, with just less than 30% of total sales in the spring and summer (in the United States), about 25% in the fall, and about 20% in the winter. Annual sales are approximately $180 million.
Both end users and dealers have been established as important customers for PLE. Collection and analysis of end-user data showed that satisfaction with the products depends on high quality, easy attachment/dismount of implements, low maintenance, price value, and service. For dealers, key requirements are high quality, parts and feature availability, rapid restock, discounts, and timeliness of support.
PLE has several key suppliers: Mitsitsiu, Inc., the sole source of all diesel engines; LANTO Axles, Inc., which provides tractor axles; Schorst Fabrication, which provides subassemblies; Cuberillo, Inc, supplier of transmissions; and Specialty Machining, Inc., a supplier of precision machine parts.
To help manage the company, PLE managers have developed a “balanced scorecard” of measures. These data, which are summarized shortly, are stored in the form of a Microsoft Excel workbook (Performance Lawn Equipment) accompanying this book. The database contains various measures captured on a monthly or quarterly basis and used by various managers to evaluate business performance. Data for each of the key measures are stored in a separate worksheet. A summary of these worksheets is given next:
Dealer Satisfaction, measured on a scale of 1–5 (1 ＝ poor, 2 ＝ less than average, 3 ＝ average, 4 ＝ above average, and 5 ＝ excellent). Each year, dealers in each region are surveyed about their overall satisfaction with PLE. The worksheet contains summary data from surveys for the past 5 years.
End-User Satisfaction, measured on the same scale as dealers. Each year, 100 users from each region are surveyed. The worksheet contains summary data for the past 5 years.
2014 Customer Survey, results from a survey for customer ratings of specific attributes of PLE tractors: quality, ease of use, price, and service on the same 1–5 scale. This sheet contains 200 observations of customer ratings.
Complaints, which shows the number of complaints registered by all customers each month in each of PLE’s five regions (North America, South America, Europe, the Pacific, and China).
Mower Unit Sales and Tractor Unit Sales, which provide sales by product by region on a monthly basis. Unit sales for each region are aggregated to obtain world sales figures.
Industry Mower Total Sales and Industry Tractor Total Sales, which list the number of units sold by all producers by region.
Unit Production Costs, which provides monthly accounting estimates of the variable cost per unit for manufacturing tractors and mowers over the past 5 years.
Operating and Interest Expenses, which provides monthly administrative, depreciation, and interest expenses at the corporate level.
On-Time Delivery, which provides the number of deliveries made each month from each of PLE’s major suppliers, number on time, and the percent on time.
Defects After Delivery, which shows the number of defects in supplier-provided material found in all shipments received from suppliers.
Time to Pay Suppliers, which provides measurements in days from the time the invoice is received until payment is sent.
Response Time, which gives samples of the times taken by PLE customer-service personnel to respond to service calls by quarter over the past 2 years.
Employee Satisfaction, which provides data for the past 4 years of internal surveys of employees to determine their overall satisfaction with their jobs, using the same scale used for customers. Employees are surveyed quarterly, and results are stratified by employee category: design and production, managerial, and sales/administrative support.
In addition to these business measures, the PLE database contains worksheets with data from special studies:
Engines, which lists 50 samples of the time required to produce a lawn-mower blade using a new technology.
Transmission Costs, which provides the results of 30 samples each for the current process used to produce tractor transmissions and two proposed new processes.
Blade Weight, which provides samples of mower-blade weights to evaluate the consistency of the production process.
Mower Test, which lists test results of mower functional performance after assembly for 30 samples of 100 units each.
Employee Retention, data from a study of employee duration (length of hire) with PLE. The 40 subjects were identified by reviewing hires from 10 years prior and identifying those who were involved in managerial positions (either hired into management or promoted into management) at some time in this 10-year period.
Shipping Cost, which gives the unit shipping cost for mowers and tractors from existing and proposed plants for a supply-chain-design study.
Fixed Cost, which lists the fixed cost to expand existing plants or build new facilities, also as part of the supply-chain-design study.
Purchasing Survey, which provides data obtained from a third-party survey of purchasing managers of customers of Performance Lawn Care.
Performance Lawn Equipment Database.xlsx
Assignment:
The worksheet Purchasing Survey in the Performance Lawn Care database provides data related to predicting the level of business (Usage Level) obtained from a third-party survey of purchasing managers of customers Performance Lawn Care.8Links to an external site.
The seven PLE attributes rated by each respondent are
8 The data and desсrіption of this case are based on the HATCO example on pages 28–29 in Joseph F. Hair, Jr., Rolph E. Anderson, Ronald L. Tatham, and William C. Black, Multivariate Analysis, 5th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998).
Delivery speed —the amount of time it takes to deliver the product once an order is confirmed
Price level —the perceived level of price charged by PLE
Price flexibility —the perceived willingness of PLE representatives to negotiate price on all types of purchases
Manufacturing image —the overall image of the manufacturer
Overall service —the overall level of service necessary for maintaining a satisfactory relationship between PLE and the purchaser
Sales force image —the overall image of the PLE’s sales force
Product quality —perceived level of quality
Responses to these seven variables were obtained using a graphic rating scale, where a 10-centimeter line was drawn between endpoints labeled “poor” and “excellent.” Respondents indicated their perceptions using a mark on the line, which was measured from the left endpoint. The result was a scale from 0 to 10 rounded to one decimal place.
Two measures were obtained that reflected the outcomes of the respondent’s purchase relationships with PLE:
Usage level —how much of the firm’s total product is purchased from PLE, measured on a 100-point scale, ranging from 0% to 100%
Satisfaction level —how satisfied the purchaser is with past purchases from PLE, measured on the same graphic rating scale as perceptions 1 through 7
The data also include four characteristics of the responding firms:
Size of firm —size relative to others in this market (0＝small;1＝large)(0＝small;1＝large)
Purchasing structure —the purchasing method used in a particular company (1＝centralized procurement,0＝decentralized procurement)(1＝centralized procurement,0＝decentralized procurement)
Industry —the industry classification of the purchaser [1＝retail(resale such as Home Depot),0＝private(nonresale, such as a landscaper)][1＝retail(resale such as Home Depot),0＝private(nonresale, such as a landscaper)]
Buying type —a variable that has three categories (1＝new purchase,2＝modified rebuy,3＝straight rebuy)(1＝new purchase,2＝modified rebuy,3＝straight rebuy)
Assignment:
Elizabeth Burke would like to understand what she learned from these data.
Apply appropriate data-mining techniques to analyze the data. For example, can PLE segment customers into groups with similar perceptions about the company?
Can cause-and-effect models provide insight about the drivers of satisfaction and usage level? Summarize your results in a report to Ms. Burke.
Section 1:
The Performance Lawn Equipment database contains data needed to develop a pro forma income statement. Dealers selling PLE products all receive 18% of sales revenue for their part of doing business, and this is accounted for as the selling expense. The tax rate is 50%.
Develop an Excel worksheet to extract and summarize the data needed to develop the income statement for 2014 and implement an Excel model in the form of a pro forma income statement for the company.
Section 2:
The CFO of Performance Lawn Equipment, J. Kenneth Valentine, would like to have a model to predict the net income for the next 3 years. To do this, you need to determine how the variables in the pro forma income statement will likely change in the future.
Using the calculations and worksheet that you developed along with other historical data in the database, estimate the annual rate of change in sales revenue, cost of goods sold, operating expense, and interest expense.
Use these rates to modify the pro Forma income statement to predict the net income over the next 3 years.
Because the estimates you derived from the historical data may not hold in the future, conduct appropriate what-if, scenario, and/or parametric sensitivity analyses to investigate how the projections might change if these assumptions don’t hold.
Construct a tornado chart to show how the assumptions impact the net income in your model.
Summarize your results and conclusions in a report to Mr. Valentine.
Assignment:
One of PLE’s manufacturing facilities produces metal engine housings from sheet metal for both mowers and tractors. Production of each product consists of five steps: stamping, drilling, assembly, painting, and packaging to ship to its final assembly plant.
The production rates in hours per unit and the number of production hours available in each department are given in the following table:
Department
Mower Housings
Tractor Housings
Production Hours Available
Stamping 0.03 0.07 200
Drilling 0.09 0.06 300
Assembly 0.15 0.10 300
Painting 0.04 0.06 220
Packaging 0.02 0.04 100
In addition, mower housings require 1.2 square feet of sheet metal per unit and tractor housings require 1.8 square feet per unit, and 2,500 square feet of sheet metal is available.
The company would like to maximize the total number of housings they can produce during the planning period.
Formulate and solve a linear optimization model and recommend a production plan.
Illustrate the results visually to help explain them in a presentation to Ms. Burke. In addition, conduct whatever what-if analyses (e.g., run different scenarios and apply parameter analysis) you feel are appropriate to include in your presentation.
Summarize your results in a well-written report.
Submission Instructions:
This is a TurnItIn proctored individual Learning Assignment and is worth 100 points.
This document should be a typed professional written report in Word and PDF format with a 1.5 max line space, a suitable font such as Times Roman or Calibri of 12 point maximum, and left, right, top, bottom margins of .8 inches maximum.
No Word and PDF format documents: No grading.
Using APA Style and Tips in Writing.
Complete and submit the assignment by 11:59 PM ET on Sunday.
Late work policies, expectations regarding proper citations, acceptable means of responding to peer feedback, and other expectations are at the discretion of the instructor.
You can expect feedback from the instructor within 48 to 72 hours from the Sunday due date.
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