Business Finance Homework Help

20140430174435performance_lawn_equipment_database.xlsx 

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 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. PLE has always emphasized quality and considers the quality it builds into its products as its primary selling point. In the past 2 years, PLE has also emphasized the ease of use of their products. Before digging into the details of operations, Elizabeth Burke wants to gain an over-view of PLE’s overall business performance and market position by examining the infor-mation 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. 

a. Dealer Satisfaction 

b. End- User Satisfaction 

c. Complaints d. Mower Unit Sales 

e. Tractor Unit Sales 

f. On- Time Delivery 

g. Defects After Delivery 

h. 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 2012 Customer Survey for each market region as a cross- tabulation ( use PivotTables as appropriate), along with frequency distri-butions, histograms, and quartiles of these data. 

Write a formal report summarizing your results for all three parts of this case.