Case study: performance lawn equipment, episode 2

 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. As we noted in the case in Chapter 1, PLE sells its products worldwide, with sales regions including North America, South America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. Three years ago, a new region was opened to serve China, where a booming market for small tractors has been established. PLE has always emphasized quality and considers the quality it builds into its products as its primary selling point. In the past two years, PLE has also emphasized the ease of use of its products. Before digging into the details of operations, Elizabeth Burke wants to gain an overview of PLE’s overall business performance and market position by examining the information provided in the database. 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.

1. Dealer Satisfaction
2. End-User Satisfaction
3. Complaints
4. Mower Unit Sales
5. Tractor Unit Sales
6. On-Time Delivery
7. Defects After Delivery
8. Response Time

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. Ms. 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.

Part 3: Ms. 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.

Part 4: Propose a monthly dashboard of the most important business information that Ms. Burke can use on a routine basis as data are updated. Create one using the most recent data. Your dashboard should not consist of more than six to eight charts, which should fit comfortably on one screen. Write a formal report summarizing your results for all four parts of this case and upload your Word document AND your Excel worksheet file to the Assignment drop box.

Parameters

• The assignment should be double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font, with one-inch margins
• Use APA for citing references and quotations