Business Analytics (MGSC 5111-11)

Assignment#1
Assignment Guidelines

• Due Date: 11:59 p.m. 31 May 2021

• This assignment will contribute 20% towards the final mark.
• The assignment must be written individually.
• The assignment must be submitted to Moodle.
• The submission file must be in PDF format and XLSX format.
• Assignment files should be named using a convention that identifies the course# and the
student’s name. For example: MGSC5111-Assignment#1-FirstNameLastName.pdf
• An important aspect of business analytics is good communication. Write up your
answers to each question in a well-written report as if you were a consultant to the JD
company. Use a variety of descriptive analysis tools to analyze the data and interpreted
the results. The analysis must be clearly demonstrated in the report.
• Reports must be neat and professional.
• You will not be marked if you do not follow the above guidelines.

Zero Tolerance for plagiarism

Case Study: John Deer Equipment

John Deer (JD), headquartered in Moline, IL, is a designer and producer of tractors
and lawnmowers used by homeowners. In the past 10 years, John Deer has added a new
series of E10 lawn tractors. This tractor builds for exceptional traction on rolling hills and
wet fields. John Deer provides most of the products to dealerships, which, in turn, sell
directly to end-users. John Deer employs 1,660 people worldwide. About half the
workforce is based in Moline; the remainder is split among their manufacturing plants.

In the United States, the focus of sales is on the eastern seaboard, California, the
Southeast, and the south-central states, which have the greatest concentration of
customers. Outside the United States, JD’s sales include a European market, a growing
South American market, and developing markets in the Pacific Rim and China. The market
is cyclical, but the different products and regions balance some of this, with just less than
30% of total sales in the spring and summer (in the United States), about 25% in the fall,
and about 20% in the winter. Annual sales are approximately $180 million.

Both end-users and dealers have been established as important customers for JD.
Collection and analysis of end-user data showed that satisfaction with the products
depends on high quality, easy attachment/dismount of improvements, low maintenance,
 price value, and service. For dealers, key requirements are high quality, parts and feature
availability, rapid restock, discounts, and timeliness of support.

John Deer has several key suppliers: Mitsitsiu, Inc., the sole source of all diesel
engines; LANTO Axles, Inc. which provides tractor axles; Schorst Fabrication, which
provides subassemblies; Cuberillo, Inc, supplier of transmissions; and Specialty
Machining, Inc., a supplier of precision machine parts.

John Deer managers have developed a “balanced scorecard” of measures. These

data, which are summarized shortly, are stored in the form of a Microsoft Excel workbook
(John Deer). The database contains various measures captured on a monthly or quarterly
basis and used by various managers to evaluate business performance. Data for each of
the key measures are stored in a separate worksheet. A summary of these worksheets is
given next:

Worksheets

• Dealer Satisfaction, measured on a scale of 1–5 (1 = poor, 2 = less than average, 3 = average,
4 = above average, and 5 = excellent). Each year, dealers in each region are surveyed about
their overall satisfaction with JD. The worksheet contains summary data from surveys for the
past 5 years.
• End-User Satisfaction measured on the same scale as dealers. Each year, 100 users from
each region are surveyed. The worksheet contains summary data for the past 5 years.
• 2014 Customer Survey, results from a survey for customer ratings of specific attributes of JD
tractors: quality, ease of use, price, and service on the same 1–5 scale. This sheet contains
200 observations of customer ratings.
• Complaints, which shows the number of complaints registered by all customers each month
in each of JD’s five regions (North America, South America, Europe, the Pacific, and China).
• Mower Unit Sales and Tractor Unit Sales, which provide sales by product by region on a
monthly basis. Unit sales for each region are aggregated to obtain world sales figures.
• Industry Mower Total Sales and Industry Tractor Total Sales, which list the number of units
sold by all producers by region.
• Unit Production Costs, which provides monthly accounting estimates of the variable cost per
unit for manufacturing tractors and mowers over the past 5 years.
• Operating and Interest Expenses, which provides monthly administrative, depreciation, and
interest expenses at the corporate level.
• On-Time Delivery, which provides the number of deliveries made each month from each of
JD’s major suppliers, number on time, and the percent on time.
• Defects After Delivery, which shows the number of defects in supplier-provided material
found in all shipments received from suppliers.
• Time to Pay Suppliers, which provides measurements in days from the time the invoice is
received until payment is sent.
• Response Time, which gives a sample of the times taken by JD customer-service personnel to
respond to service calls by a quarter over the past 2 years.
• Employee Satisfaction, which provides data for the past 4 years of internal surveys of
employees to determine their overall satisfaction with their jobs, using the same scale used
 for customers. Employees are surveyed quarterly, and results are stratified by employee
category: design and production, managerial, and sales/administrative support

In addition to these business measures, the JD database contains worksheets with data from
special studies:

• Engines, which lists 50 samples of the time required to produce a lawn-mower blade using
new technology.
• Transmission Costs, which provides the results of 30 samples each for the current process
used to produce tractor transmissions and two proposed new processes.
• Blade Weight, which provides a sample of mower-blade weights to evaluate the consistency
of the production process.
• Mower Test, which lists test results of mower functional performance after assembly for 30
sample of 100 units each.
• Employee Retention, data from a study of employee duration (length of hire) with JD. The 40
subjects were identified by reviewing hires from 10 years prior and identifying those who
were involved in managerial positions (either hired into management or promoted into
management) at some time in this 10-years period.
• Shipping Cost, which gives the unit shipping cost for mowers and tractors from existing and
proposed plants for a supply-chain-design study.
• Fixed Cost, which lists the fixed cost to expand existing plants or build new facilities, also as
part of the supply-chain-design study.
• Purchasing Survey, which provides data obtained from a third-party survey of purchasing
managers of customers of Performance Lawn Care.
• Regional Survey, which provides data obtained from a survey of the performance of each
region in terms of quality, ease of use, price, and service.

JD hired you as a chief business analyst. Each day one task has been assigned to you. Your
responsivity is to analyze the dataset and create a report at the end of each day. Your daily
tasks are as follows:

Day1 (Chap. 1): (15 marks)

Your manager provided you with prices for JD products for the past 5 years:

Year Mower price ($) Tractor price ($)

2016 105 3,200
2017 155 3,450
2018 170 3,400
2019 180 3,750
2020 180 3,300

Create a new worksheet in the database to compute gross revenues by month and region, as well as
world-wide totals, for each product using the data in Industry Mower Total Sales and Industry
Tractor Unit Sales.
Day2 (Chap. 3): (15 marks)
JD is establishing a diversity program to show its commitment to gender equality. Your manager
wants to investigate if the company has been gender bias in hiring and compensation. Create pivot
tables and charts that compare the number of males and females employed by JD. Also, compare
their salary and years of education. Use the Employee Retention worksheet.

Day3 (Chap. 3): (10 marks)

Use an appropriate chart to compare the performance of different regions based on the survey. For
example, you can compare regions based on entities such as quality, service, etc. Use the Regional
Survey worksheet.

Day4 (Chap. 3): (20 marks) (2 marks for each chart + 6 marks for the conclusion)
John Deer originally produced lawnmowers, but a significant portion of sales volume over recent
years has come from the growing small-tractor market. John Deer sells their 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. John Deer has always emphasized quality and considers the quality it builds into its
products as its primary selling point. In the past 2 years, JD has also emphasized the ease of use of its
products.
Before digging into the details of operations, the manager wants to gain an overview of JD’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 the analysis of these charts.

• Complaints
• Blade Weights
• Engines
• Response Time
• On-Time Delivery
• Defects after Delivery
• Unit Tractor Transmission costs

Day5 (Chap. 3): (10 marks)

Propose a monthly dashboard of the most important business information that your
manager 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 6–8 charts, which should fit
comfortably on one screen.

Day6 (Chap. 5): (15 marks)

Your manager wants to explore some information about employees. She asked you to analyze
data in the Employee Retention worksheet and answer the following questions.

1. What is the probability that an employee is a male and a college grad? (5 marks)
2. What is the probability that an employee be a local given that the employee is female? (5
marks)
3. What is the probability that an employee leaves the company after 5 years? (5 marks)
Day7 (Chap. 5): (15 marks)
John Deer collects a variety of data from special studies, many of which are related to the quality of
its products and production time. The company collects data about production time for engines
during one shift. The worksheet Engines shows 50 production times taken from the manufacturing
process. The manager has asked you to study these data from an analytics perspective. Drawing upon
your experience, you have developed a number of questions.

1. What is the probability that production time will be less than 51.5? (4 marks)
2. What is the actual percent of production times that exceed 50 or are less than 48.2 from the
data in the worksheet? (5 marks)
3. Could any of the production times be considered outliers, which might indicate a problem
with the manufacturing process or materials? (4 marks)