Reference no: EM132316061

Data and Business Decision Making Assignment -

Overview of Assignment - You will be analysing a business data set and producing a report with the aims of:

• Providing an overview of business performance.
• Identifying and quantifying from the data, possible business problem(s) or opportunity(s), and clearly communicating these in a way that allows your client to know where to focus their attention.
• Suggesting next steps the business should take with respect to the possible problem/opportunity.

Your client is a manager/executive with significant decision making delegation for the area of the business to which the data relates. For example;

• A Sales Manager (for Flash Eddie's Print Shop).
• A Call Centre Manager (for General Building Insurance).

Your client is very busy and time poor. Thus, it is important that your report is concise and sticks to page limits. You can include "Nice to know" information, but this should NOT clutter up the main report, but rather be relegated to an appendix.

Data -

1. Your team will be allocated one of the two data sets. Either:

• Sales data set (63,925 records)
• Call Centre data set (234,742 records)

2. Each data set can be found in the Assignment folder on MyLo.

A. Executive Summary (no more than half a page)

Key Concept: "What's the issue(s) and why do I (the client) care?"

• what's the issue - the small number of key things that are associated with performance issues (or opportunities)
• why do I care - quantified KPI impact(s), the potential size of the prize(s).

Your executive summary should:

A1. Be brief and punchy, and easy to read. It should sell the rest of the report - motivate the time poor reader to spend the time digesting it.

A2. Clearly state your key finding(s) including a quantification and very brief description of the key opportunity(s) / problem(s).

A3. Summarise any key recommendations (or next steps).

B. Performance Overview (two to three pages)

Key Concept: "How are we going, and what's important?"

• How are we going - what is the current KPI performance, how has it been tracking (if we have time series data).
• What's important - typically a breakdown of KPI by some key business categories (for example, geography, organizational units, products, markets, channels, etc...).

B1. Introduce your study and describe the scope of your study (i.e. what entities, time periods etc. the study covers, and the source of your data, etc...). Also include any key caveats and or assumptions.

B2. Include a KPI performance characterisation and effectively communicate performance, not only overall, but also for broken down by important factors, including time, if time series data is available.

a. We might expect around 3-6 "messages" here1, with each message supported by an appropriate summary device (chart, table, summary measure, depending upon your client's preference.)

b. Typically, we might focus on views that expose change or difference. (See point B3 below). For instance, if regions A, B and C are doing roughly equally well w.r.t. the KPI, it may not be worth wasting valuable graphics space on this, but rather just covering it off with a short sentence and a reference the Appendix2.

c. Keep to simple views (1 or 2 dimensions at most) and avoid complex dissections of the data (which may feature in the next section of the report.)

B3. You should draw attention to any interesting feature(s) that you will investigate in greater detail in the next section.

C. Issues and Opportunities (two to three pages)

Key Concept: "Tell me more about the big issues/opportunities. Give me confidence that these are worth pursuing."

• Describe the key issues identified and briefly how you found them.
• Quantify the identified issues in terms of impact on KPI (probably also quantify volume). Briefly explain how you have quantified the issue, sufficiently for the reader to have confidence in the numbers.

C1. Explore the data in greater detail, looking for relationship and combinations of circumstances which correspond to poorer (or better) outcomes in your key measure(s). Explain your reasoning. Stick to a small number of big issues.

C2. Support your key messages with an appropriate chart and/or table and/or summary measures that illustrate the potential issues identified in C1.

C3. Provide an indicative quantification of the impact of any issues identified in C2. This is the potential "size of the prize". For example only, in a report looking at production waste we might note that "When the evening shift on production line C is producing component Z, average waste levels are 128kg per day higher than the average for other situations producing component Z. If we can determine and rectify the reason for this, we could potentially save up 128kg per day, which equates to a saving of $12800 per day in raw materials" ... or alternatively a small table maybe used to convey the quantification more efficiently.

D. Write Conclusion (no more than half a page)

Key Concept: "Summarise what you've told me, and tell me what I need to do."

D1. Discuss your results, and make recommendations for appropriate business/policy decision making. Where possible this could include postulating one or more possible reasons why the situation(s) might be occurring, and suggestion(s) as to what should be done next to better understand the situation(s).

D2. You should also comment on 'bigger' issues related to the data provided and make suggestions for consideration of other variables and analyses which would be valuable in future research and business/policy decision making.

E. Appendix (no more than 5 pages)

Key Concept: "Nice to know extra information."

E1. Additional details relating to Section B - Performance Overview. The intent here is to provide additional information should the client wish to seek greater insights into the data, or have someone check or replicate your analysis. Possible examples could include:

• Brief description of methodology
• Alternative presentations of data presented in section B, often providing additional detail.
• Less important (eg nice to know) perspectives on your key measure(s) that were not worth including in section B.
• NB other possibilities exist. Remember the Appendix is where people go IF they want to know more. In respect to BEA674, the Appendix also represents an opportunity for you to display data summary and presentation skills that you have not used in the main body of the report.

E2. Likewise for Section C - Issues and Opportunities

F. Overall Structure

Key Concept: "Easy to read, easy to follow, logical."

• Charts, Diagrams and tables have identifiers (eg Table 2 - Frequency Distribution of Daily Waste) and located near text which discusses them.
• Pages numbered.
• Not cluttered. 11 or 12 point font, single or 1.5 line spacing.
• Clear Informative Headings and sub headings.
• Table of Contents and Executive Summary on front page.
• Logical flow. NB The points in the guidelines above A1, A2... E2 are not section headings, but rather are things that should be covered within the report.

Attachment:- Assignment - Data File.rar