Notesale: Turn your study into money

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Exam 12 October, answers
Strategic Management (Egerton University)

Part 1: PLE originally produced lawn mowers, but a significant portion of sales volume
over recent years has come from the growing small-tractor market
...
Three years ago a new
region was opened to serve China, where a booming market for small tractors has been
established
...
In the past 2 years, PLE has also emphasized
the ease of use of their products
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Specifically, she is asking you to construct appropriate charts
for the data in the following worksheets and summarize your conclusions from analysis
of these charts
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Dealer Satisfaction: Dealers were rated on a 0-5 satisfaction scale
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The sample sizes were at
their best in North America at 125
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However, all sample sizes grew

over time
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In South America, dealer
satisfaction went up by about a factor of thirty between 2010 and
2014
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In the Pacific Rim region and China, there was very little change in
dealer satisfaction
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b
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Zero being the worst and five being the best
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In North America, end-user satisfaction grew each year
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In Europe, end-user satisfaction varied each year with
no pattern emerging
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In China, enduser satisfaction increased each year
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c
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North America has the highest
proportion of complaints, probably because they do the most business
out of the five regions
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Customers' lawn mowers need to run efficiently to cut the grass
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As the
company grows each year, so do the complaints
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Mower Unit Sales: According to the data, North America has
consistently sold the highest number of mowers
...
Sales are at their highest when it
starts getting hot
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Ultimately, the
number of mowers sold between 2010 and 2014 has stayed the same
each year
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e
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In 2010 and 2011, North America and Europe were tied
for the region that sold the greatest proportion of tractors
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The
three most dominant regions for tractor sales have been North
America, South America, and Europe
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f
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The
percentage of deliveries that were on-time ultimately stayed constant
over time
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g
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In 2010, the number defects
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remained constant
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In 2012, the number of defects decreased significantly towards the end
of the year
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In 2014, the number of defects started even lower than the
previous year and continued to decrease at a constant rate
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PLE's suppliers
are getting better at reducing the number of defects their products
have after delivery
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Response Time: One of the most important components in customer
service is the company's response time to customer calls
...
The number of customers PLE
gets depends on how quickly they can respond to their callers
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5 and 4 minutes, until the
4'h quarter
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5 minutes
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At the
beginning of 2014, average response time dropped to around 3
minutes and did not drop again until the third quarter
...
5 minutes
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Part 2: As noted in the case in Chapter 1, the supply chain worksheets provide cost
data associated with logistics between existing plants and customers as well as
proposed new plants
...
Burke wants you to extract the records associated with the
unit shipping costs of proposed plant locations and compare the costs of existing
locations against those of the proposed locations using quartiles
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Burke would also like a quantitative summary of the average responses for
each of the customer attributes in the worksheet 2014 Customer Survey for each
market region as a cross-tabulation (use PivotTables as appropriate), along with
frequency distributions, histograms, and quartiles of these data
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Burke can use on a routine basis as data are updated
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Your dashboard should not consist of more than 6—8 charts, which should
fit comfortably on one screen
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In part 1, the goal was to provide an overview of PLE's business performance
and market position through charts and graphs and analyze them
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The Dealer Satisfaction graph tells us how satisfied dealers are doing
business with the company
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The End-User Satisfaction graph tells us how satisfied
customers who use the company's mowers and tractors are
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The Customer Satisfaction graph
tells us the overall satisfaction of customers, which we would want to be high
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The Complaints graph tells us how many complaints the company receives
each month
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For the Mower Unit Sales and Tractor
Unit Sales graphs, we want to see sales increasing for both each year
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The Industry Sales graphs give us an idea of
how the company is doing in comparison to the rest of the industry as a whole
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The
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On-time Delivery graph tells us how reliable the company is at physically delivering its
products
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The Response Time graph tells us how
efficient our call center is at answering customer calls
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The Fixed Cost tables show us which plants have the highest costs to
produce the company's products
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In Part 2, different aspects of customer satisfaction, measured in 2014, are
summarized
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In Part 3, a PivotTable was created in which the average response for each
customer attribute (Quality, Ease of Use, Price, and Service) was calculated for each
market region (China, Europe, North America, South America, and Pacific)
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As for market
regions, China had the lowest overall average for all the customer attributes by a wide
margin
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North America had significantly more responses than any other market region
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In Part 4, a dashboard was created showing the most recent info by month for
certain metrics the business might want to evaluate routinely
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Some metrics
might not need to be included on the dashboard because they are not things that
necessarily need to be monitored constantly, like employee satisfaction, because
satisfaction generally takes a longer period of time to show a change
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Mower Sales

Tractor Sales

14000

Units Sold

Units Sold

12000

5000
4500
4000
3500
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500

Region
m NA ■ SA

Europe

Region
m NA ■ SA

Pacific ■ China

Eur

Pac ■ China

Complaints

Operating and Interest Expenses
400

$700,000

350
$600,000

Number of Complaints

300
$500,000

$400,000
$300,000
$200,000
$100,000

200
150

S0

Region
Interest ■ Depreciation ■ Adm inistrafive

■ NA

On-Time Deliveries
1600

SA

Eur m Pac ■ Chi na

Response Time
3
...
5

1000
800

Total

0

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