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assignment 1

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Audacious Aundrey
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7 views

assignment 1

Uploaded by

Audacious Aundrey
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ASSIGNMENT 1

(20 Marks)
Question 1: Answer questions based on case study 1, detailed below.
Case Study 1:
You give employees electronic reports, maybe even a dashboard. But are you helping them
make better day-to-day decisions?
Companies can’t report their way to great results—though you wouldn’t know it from their
accumulated underused reports and dashboards. Companies that get this critical point are
moving away from IT-centric business intelligence (BI) programs and toward results-focused
performance management. True: BI does more than generate reports. But add in query and
analysis tools and sophisticated predictive and statistical analytics, and those tools and
technologies are overwhelmingly under IT’s control. In contrast, performance management, or
PM, is defined by business needs, providing decision-makers with the data they need to make
the right moves that fit company strategy.
Companies often incorporate performance management into their budgeting and financial
processes in what’s called corporate or financial PM. The next step is operational PM, where
they apply BI to practical, day-to-day decisions in the supply chain, sales, customer service,
and other areas.
That’s what’s happening at United Agri Products (UAP), a unit of $5 billion-a-year chemical
and fertiliser supplier Agrium, which started doing operational PM projects using IBM’s
Cognos BI platform. “After years of IT preaching the value of BI to business, we reached a
point of maturity where the roles started to reverse, and the business started coming to us with
ideas,” says David Wheat, UAP’s director of decision support systems.
UAP’s director of operations brought one such project to IT. The CEO had asked him to cut
end-of-year inventory by $25 million, a difficult task for an agricultural company given ever-
changing weather conditions, crop disease, and insect infestations across various regions.
“The operations director sketched out exactly what he wanted on a whiteboard,” Wheat says.
Then he said, “If I can know at any point in time what I have in inventory and can forecast
what the consumption will be through the end of the season, I’ll know what dollar amount I’ll
have left, and I can go after the high-dollar overages.”
With that context, Wheat laid out a model for a PM system that included what data he needed
and when he needed it to make decisions. His model also included a financial target.
UAP lacked a sales forecasting application, so Wheat’s team developed one by integrating
relevant information—current inventory levels, open purchase orders, prior year purchase
histories, and predicted overages or shortages—into a single report. The application includes a
daily alert that notifies managers in four regions whenever a purchase order can potentially
create excess season-ending inventory. “All that data presented in one place, with exceptions
highlighted in colour, made problems jump right to the top for the director and his regional
managers,” Wheat says. That information led managers to investigate open, unconfirmed
purchase orders to see if they were justified. The result: “Within two weeks, UAP had cancelled

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$2 million worth of POs for products that weren’t needed.”

Use the case study 1 above to answer the following questions in your own words:
Q1.1 What types of information may be visualised on a CEO Dashboard for UAP?
Mark: 5 (CO3)
Q1.2 Explain the critical steps of a generic/typical forecasting application project, starting
from the need recognition step.
Marks:5 (CO3)

Question 2: Answer questions based on case study 2, detailed below.


Case Study 2:
Thanks to outsourcing, in-house technology is no longer an operational prerequisite. Software,
servers, Internet connectivity, and even whole operations like payroll and HR can be sourced
from third parties and branded, so neither the customers nor employees of the business need
ever know these mechanisms reside outside the company headquarters.
That being said, the fact that the United Kingdom’s rail information service, National Rail
Enquiries (NRE), served 55 million customers online last year alone— it relies on extensive
self-service and contact centre service channels but has a core staff of only 21 people—is no
small achievement. “NRE has about 22 suppliers of various services. Everything we do is
outsourced. We have 1,500 people in call centres alone, who all work for NRE,” says Chris
Scoggins, NRE’s CEO. The NRE’s telephone information service was born when the
organisation was created in 1996, with the privatisation of British Rail. Since then, it has
expanded to include automated
telephone services and a successful real-time online train time and journey planning service.
Scoggins says NRE has a strategy of maintaining several suppliers to play them off against
each other and raise the stakes in demonstrating service excellence. “We have the maximum
number of suppliers we can manage effectively. However, perhaps more importantly, we need
the right number of suppliers to maintain a competitive market for the services they run. In
some areas, we have a strategy to build up several niche players in the market; otherwise, we
are relying on one supplier.”
“What we’re trying to do is move toward several long-term relationships with partners we trust
and give more work to them,” Scoggins says. “Contracts are aligned to incentives related to
achieving our business objectives, and it’s up to the supplier to outperform the minimum
standard. They get more work if they demonstrate they can deliver over and above that.”
Despite heading up a vast, virtual company, Scoggins says there is still pressure to drive
business improvement and success. “When I joined, there was no real self-service provision
for the customer. NRE was a huge, outsourced call centre with virtually no other provision for
finding information. I saw this as a huge opportunity driven by two things. The first was that

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customer needs should be met by whichever channel is most convenient for them; the second
was our call centres, which have the most volatile volumes in Europe.”
NRE always seeks to be proactive and do new things, like the speech recognition technology
they use with their telephone TrainTracker service. “It is the most sophisticated mass-market
speech recognition service in the world,” notes Scoggins. He adds, “I regard our outsourcing
suppliers as part of our team, and my job is getting my team excited and encouraged to do the
job in hand.”

Use the case study 2 above to answer the following questions in your own words:
Q2.1 Explain the partnership management strategy adopted by NRE? What other options it
may have explored?
Marks:5 (CO3)
Q2.2 What are some benefits and pitfalls of outsourcing services for Analytics? How to
overcome the pitfalls?
Marks:5 (CO3)

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