Bea 674 Data And Business Assessment Answers

Each data set occurs on a separate worksheet of the “Assignment Data.xlsx” workbook, which can also be found in the Assignment folder on MyLo. 
 
Your executive summary should: A1. Identify which key measure(s) you investigated, briefly characterise overall performance (in no more than two sentences), and explain why the measure(s) is important to business success. (i.e. provide a very brief context for the report.) A2. Clearly state your key finding(s) including a quantification of the key opportunity(s) / problem(s). A3. Summarise key recommendations (next steps). A4. Sell the rest of the report – motivate the time poor reader to spend the time digesting it. 
 
Describe the scope of your study (i.e. what entities, time periods etc. the study covers, and the source of your data.). Also include any key caveats. B2. Expand upon the performance characterisation in the Executive Summary and effectively communicate how key measure(s) performed not only overall, but also for broken down by important categories. For instance: a. A Sales Manager would not only want to know how overall profit or revenue is going, but also see it from product perspective, a sales person perspective and so on… b. Whilst an Operations Manager would not only want overall view of fault volume and time to fix, but would also want to see how its tracking over time, and from a fault type perspective and so on… c. And a Call Centre Manager would want to how overall customer experience and immediate sales are going, but also what that looks like from a customer age perspective, as well as view as to which issues are most common, etc. 

Answer:

The objective of the Study

The objective of the study is to offer an analysis of the current state of the Star Solar Cell which will offer a platform to assist the workforce planning in the coming years. The study has been conducted in the month of April this year. The marketing staff profession is the largest in the field of marketing with workforce planning forecast highlighting, that in the medium or long-term, sales agents will be fulfilling the demand of the clients and will be making products for the company.  

Contribution factors to enhanced demand and sales includes effective sales agents, high contribution margin, and standardized products. In relation to contribution, there have been significant discussions around the sales workforce and the contribution made by them towards the company and the impact this will have on the product sales. The reasons highlight the importance of sales agent planning over the long term (Nag, 2011; Anderson et al., 2007).

Performance Overview

In this section profit contribution from each sale is determined. The main target of our research analysis are the sales executives. The sales executives need to have the feel of how the sales factor has been working in both terms of volume and revenue which are associated with the varied products offered by the Solar cell Company. In particular, the contribution factor, product type, sales agent data will be measured against the total contribution factor and the anomalies in the data will be determined which are affecting the profits of the company (Anderson et al., 2005; Anderson, 2010).

This analysis will be done as the sales agents of the company would not just want to know the overall profit of the company but would also like to know the product perspective and which sales person has earned the maximum contribution factor (Crain Communications, 2004; Mishra, 2009);.

Key Variables

The key variables for the study are the continuous numerical variables, the maximum contribution provided to the company by which product and salesperson. These variables are central to the analysis and the study objective.

The explanatory variables in the study are product type, sales agent, and power of the product. Another main variable which is to be taken under the study is the contribution factor.

1. Product type: There is significant literature determining the imminent product type and the impact it has on the workforce and contribution. We aim to examine which product type of the company is being sold at a high level and which product type is making the maximum contribution.  
2. Sales agent efficiency: Given that marketing is dominated by the sales agents, we will be examining the efficiency of the sales executives of the company, by analyzing which sales executive has made the highest contribution to the company (Nassazi, 2013).
3. Power: In this, we will be examining what power product is being liked by the customers the most, so that the company can plan developing more of it.

Description of Data Collection

The solar cell company is currently having a wide marketing executive staff, so with the help of convenience sampling we have collected the data. Convenience sampling is non-probability sampling method. The process involves meeting the sales executive and collecting the data regarding quotes, cost, product type, power and contrition (Levine et al., 2013; Anderson et al., 2009; Williams et al., 2009).

Data Analysis

In this section we will be providing charts and summary measures which will show the issues unidentified or opportunities for the business in the market (Khan, 2011; Girija, 2003).

Classification of the Power (kwh) of the product which is being sold maximum; (Daniel & Sam, 2011)

The chart below shows that the sales executives of the company are being able to sell the products which have 17.5 Kwh power, 15 Kwh power and 10 Kwh power as these have the maximum percentage. The analysis shows an opportunity for the sales agents to determine that the customers the most in comparison to the other power characteristic holdings are liking the products with such power characteristic

Power7.5	Power 10	Power 12.5	Power 15	Power 17.5	Power 20
82	210	203	207	205	139

Classification of the products sale in respect to product type

At present, the company is selling three types of models, premium model, basic model and standard model. The chart below reveals that the sales executives of the company are able to sell the maximum units of the standard model product of the company. The analysis reveals that the standard model of the company is liked by many customers and the sales executives are able to sell them more in comparison to other models. The second best model of the company is the basic model. After the standard model people more likely opt for the basic model of the company instead of the premium model.

Basic Model	Premium Model	Standard Model
442	106	498

Contribution by the product model

The chart below shows that the standard product model of the company is the model which has successfully gained the maximum amount of contribution percentage for the company. The sales executives have been able to sell the maximum number of standard models of the company with a high contribution level.  

Basic Model	Premium Model	Standard Model
12.53%	9.41%	14.61%

Sales made by Sales Executive

The chart below shows that the sales executives of the company are able to gain quite a good number of sales. The maximum amount of sales has been made by Raj. 34 percent of the sales of the products have been made by Raj. In second place, Lee and Marry are there, who have been able to contribute 25% of the sales each.

Lee	Marry	Raj	Vlad
262	260	352	172

The maximum contribution made by sales executives

The chart below reveals that the maximum contribution in the profit figure has been made by the sales executive Vlad. The noticeable fact is that Vlad is not the sales member who has given maximum product sales, however, he has been able to derive the maximum amount of contribution in the profit.

Lee	Marry	Raj	Vlad
12.48%	13.37%	10.36%	20.39%

The chart analysis above reveals that the sales executives of the company are capable of earning high sales, but are not being able to earn high contribution. If the company arranges training sessions for the sales executives then they will be able to ear more contribution margins for the company.  However, another important fact to be considered from this analysis is that the company is successfully selling the maximum number of standard models which means there is an opportunity for more sales coming from this model.

Conclusion

The data analysis done in the above section reveals that the company has been able to sell the standard product model the most. In fact, the model which has a power size of 17.5 Kwh, 15Kwh and 10 Kwh are the ones customers find more useful. The main opportunity here for the company is to develop more of such product specifications so that it becomes easy for the sales executives to sell more products in the market, as these specifications are in demand. On the other side, it is noticeable that Raj (sales executive) has been able to derive the maximum unit of sales for the company; however, he was not able to make the maximum contribution in the profits. He was able to sell more products but at low margins, which is good from the point of view of unit sales but in terms of profit he seems to be lacking. Vlad (sales executive) has made the maximum contribution in profits. Vlad has made a high contribution to low sales unit. This calls for serious attention from the company. The company is in dire need of arranging training sessions for the sales executive so that they are able to gain the maximum sales units at the maximum contribution margin, because only this strategy will help the company in earning high sales growth and profits. The big issue for the company is that the agents that are making high sales contribution are not able to sell more units and the ones that are selling high number of units are not able to contribute to profit. These issues can be resolved by extensive marketing training and making sales executives understand what they need to do to be efficient. For the purpose of business decision making sales, contribution factor is valuable for the future research.  

Suggestions

• Develop more of the Standard model as it is more in demand.
• Developing the standard model with power size of 17.5 Kwh, 15Kwh, and 10 Kwh.
• The arrangement of training for the sales executives so that each sales agent makes sales of unit with a high contribution margin (Business Insight Ltd, 2018; Amadi, 2014).

Refernces

Amadi, E.J. (2014) The effect of training and development on employees’ performance; At Safaricom limited call centre [online]. Available from: https://erepository.uonbi.ac.ke/bitstream/handle/11295/78203/Amandi_The%20effect%20of%20training%20and%20development%20on%20eployee's.pdf?sequence=4&isAllowed=y [Accessed 17 May 2018].

Anderson, D.R. (2010. Statistics for Business and Economics. Cengage Learning EMEA.

Anderson, D.R., Sweeney, D.J. & Williams, T.A. (2005) Essentials of Statistics for Business and Economics. Thomson/South-Western.

Anderson, D., Sweeney, D. & Williams, T. (2007) Statistics for Business and Economics. Cengage Learning.

Anderson, D.R., Sweeney, D.J. & Williams, T.A. (2009) Statistics for business and economics. West Pub. Co.

Business Insight Ltd (2018) The Importance of Training and Development in the Workplace [online]. Available from: https://2020projectmanagement.com/resources/project-management-training-and-qualifications/the-importance-of-training-and-development-in-the-workplace [Accessed 15 May 2018].

Crain Communications (2004) Workforce Management. Crain Communications.

Daniel, P.S. & Sam, A.G. (2011) Research Methodology. Gyan Publishing House.

Girija, M. (2003) Research Methodology. S. Chand Publishing.

Khan (2011) Research Methodology. APH Publishing.

Levine, D.M. et al. (2013) Statistics for Managers. Pearson Education.

Mishra, P. (2009) Sales Management: Keys to Effective Sales. Global India Publications.

Nag, A. (2011) Importance of Sales Training Programs for an Organization [online]. Available from: https://blog.commlabindia.com/elearning-design/sales-training-programs [Accessed 15 May 2018].

Nassazi, A. (2013) The Effect of Training on Employee Performance[online]. Available from: https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/67401/THESIS.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y [Accessed 15 May 2018].

Williams, T.A., Anderson, D.R. & Sweeney, D.J. (2009) Contemporary Business Statistics. South-Western.