Introduction
Latrobe Valley Product Gallery (LVPG) specialises in promoting and selling both (i) stand space at trade fairs and (ii) tickets for visitors to trade fairs in Latrobe Valley, Gippsland area. The company currently promotes and sells two different sized stand spaces, to new or returning exhibitors, for a number of Trade Fairs locally and overseas.
LVPG also provides a number of additional value-added services to
exhibitors for fees, such as organising exhibitor stands, developing marketing material for exhibitors to distribute at fairs, arranging travel and/or accommodation for exhibitors, and hospitality/catering for exhibitors to offer their customers attending the trade fair. LVPG also organise visitor tickets for the trade fairs, which also provide commission income.
All these activities are managed through the efforts
of a number of sales representatives. The company's founder, Ms Diamantina Rose, like all small business owners, is always interested in finding ways to increase revenues and decrease expenses. Ms Rose has recently hired you as her business analyst and poses some operational-level questions about the performance of her business.
She is also eager to hear your thoughts and ideas on how to
improve the business and requires you to make several recommendations on how to improve the company's performance, especially in relation to the following business objectives:
• improving the sales strategy;
• improving internal efficiencies and effectiveness; and
• building strong lasting relationships with its customers.
Ms Rose has provided you with last year's sales information in the "ITECH1005_assignment_data.xlsx" file. The data needs to be analysed and visualised to help observations related to the business operation and its shortcomings.
The data worksheet "Sales" contains collected information of the consultancy's operations in the current year. These details included:
• Date (of customer order),
• Trade Fair
• Customer (i.e. exhibiting company)
• space sold (sq.m.)
• Sales Representative
• time spent by Sales Representative to complete sale
• returning Exhibitor?
• Exhibitor stand organised?
• Exhibitor travel organised?
• Exhibitor accommodation organised?
• Exhibitor marketing material organised?
• Exhibitor hospitality organised?
• Visitor tickets sold
The fees charged by LVPG to customers (i.e.
Some Hints
The business options are linked to a number of questions posed by Ms Rose. Your role is to answer these specific questions and to support your answers with your data analysis as presented in the appropriate tables and charts. Ensure that your recommendations address the company's objectives, and that they are clearly linked to your observations.
There is no ‘ideal' or ‘best' way of doing this project. You'll be assessed on your insight of the data, on your ability to make observations by analysing (with formulas) and visualising (with charts) your data, and your ability to link your observations to business issues.
There are numerous Microsoft Excel facilities and functions that may be useful in this project. While planning your workbook, and especially the observations, you may wish to review the tutorials on the related topics (e.g. Excel functions, absolute and relative cell referencing, formatting, chartings and
managing large worksheets, as well as on the analysis of Excel data and drawing recommendations). The Excel workbook contains all the necessary data for your assignment. However, you need to make sure the records included in the worksheets are not faulty or inaccurate (e.g. missing data) to avoid errors in calculations.
You will very likely need to analyses beyond the assessable tasks to gain sufficient insight into the business operations to provide recommendations to Ms Rose. Include any additional analyses or summaries on the calculations worksheet.
You might check the space available and compare it to the space sold this year. Make sure you review the marking guide, to ensure you complete all required tasks before submission.
Assignment Assessment
The questions posed to you in this assignment range from easy, through medium to challenging. However, it is expected that all students will succeed in all the tasks. Some of the tasks are very similar to those covered in tutorials and the associated exercises. Some of the challenging tasks may rely on insight that requires self-directed study (e.g. using help facilities in Excel to explore in depth some of the
topics covered in the tutorials).
This assignment is worth 30% of total marks for this course and will be marked on:
• your demonstrated understanding of the problems;
• completeness of the tasks;
• exploration of the features in Microsoft Office; and
• quality of the submission (Excel workbook & Word document).