Reference no: EM132339121

Assignment - Business Decision Making

Task 1

A manufacturing company employing 12,500 has decided to invest in recreational and leisure facilities for its employees. In order to provide the appropriate facilities it wishes to consult the employees on what facilities should be provided.

(a) Construct a questionnaire which gathers information on what recreational and leisure activities employees presently engage in and what other facilities would they wish to have available.

(b) Show clearly how you would sample the employees, distribute and collect the questionnaire.

(c) What secondary information sources would be useful in comparing the results of the internal survey?

Task 2

A company fleet car manager has gathered the following data about the weekly mileage of 120 salespersons in one week.

Mileage	Frequency
400-419	12
420-439	27
440-459	34
460-479	24
480-499	15
500-519	8

a) How might the manager have collected this data?

(b) Using a spreadsheet produce a histogram of the above data.

(c) Construct a grouped frequency curve and show the interquartile range.

(d) What does the interquartile range tell you about the use of company car.

(e) How does the interquartile range relate to percentiles?

Task 3

(a) In your role within the organization you receive and disseminate data/information. Produce a short business report (1,000 – 1,200 words) showing how you receive this data/information and how you integrate into the organisation’s management information system (MIS), manual or automated. Use charts, diagrams and narrative to show how and what data is captured, how it is transformed into information, stored and retrieved and how it is used for decision making.

(b) Produce a short set of presentation slides, using PowerPoint or similar software package, summarising your business report, which could be used as an aide memoire to a verbal presentation of the business report.

If you use any information printed off the system e.g. screen captures, ensure it is not commercially sensitive.

(c) The following data shows the number of vehicles per population and the number of road deaths per population.

Country	Vehicles per 100 population	Road deaths per 100,000 population
Great Britain	31	14
Belgium	32	30
Denmark	30	23
France	46	32
Germany	30	26
Irish republic	19	20
Italy	35	21
Netherlands	40	23
Canada	46	30
USA	57	35

(i) Create a scatter diagram for the data in the table above.

(ii) Either calculate the correlation coefficient manually or produce it on the scatter diagram. Comment whether there is a link between
road deaths and the number of vehicles on the road. Would you expect this to be true? Provide reasons for your answer.

(iii) Create a trend line on the diagram and show what a country with 25 vehicles per 100 population might expect in the number of road
deaths per 100,000 population.

Task 4

After a number of years in operation the recreation and leisure centre constructed in Task 1 requires extension and the management committee have decided an extension is needed to provide extra facilities and to cope with increasing demand for existing facilities. A project plan has been produced and is shown below.

Activity	Description	Preceding activity	Time (weeks)
A	Survey site	-	6
B	Develop initial proposal	-	8
C	Obtain approval of board	A,B	12
D	Select architect	C	4
E	Compile budget	C	6
F	Finalize design	D,E	15
G	Agree financing	E	12
H	Hire contractor	F,G	8

(a) Draw a network diagram for the project.

(b) Determine the critical path.

(c) If approved the project is forecast to cost £500,000. Expected cash flows generated from the new facilities are given below.

	£000	£000
Total cost of project		500
Expected net cash flows
Year 1	20
Year 2	50
Year 3	100
Year 4	200
Year 5	300
Year 6	30	700
Net return		200

Assuming a rate of interest of 8%, calculate the project’s overall return using the following methods.

(i) Payback

(ii) Discounted payback

Year	0	1	2	3	4	5	6
Discount factor	1.0	0.9259	0.8573	0.7938	0.7350	0.6806	0.6302