Economics Milestone Assignment
Overview: In this second milestone assignment for the final project, you will continue your analysis of the economic problem presented in the case study on your selected company (Microsoft, Heinz, or American Airlines). Using the information gathered in the problem statement, you must now frame your company's problem within the context of the appropriate market structure, conducting mathematical and/or statistical calculations that will identify significant trends and relationships to facilitate demand forecasting and potential impacts on profits. Keeping in mind that your audience of corporate decision makers may not be experts in economic theory and data analysis, you must seek to present your information in an easily accessible and understandable way.
Prompt: To complete the second step of this final project, you will submit a theoretical and quantitative analysis that links the problem statement to the relevant economic factors at play. Depending on your company's unique problem, you may look to answer questions such as the following:
Are customer preferences changing?
Is there a shift in demand?
Is there a change in technology?
To answer these questions, include a discussion of demand and its likely elasticity, an application of marginal analysis, and costs in your statement
Identify and illustrate these trends and relationships using mathematical principles. This will involve use of the proper algebraic, regression, and other quantitative methods to generate scatterplots of your data, highlighting trend lines and outliers as appropriate. You may find it useful to review these mathematical techniques using the following tutorials:
Describing Relationships in Quantitative Data (Khan Academy)
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics-probability/describing-relationships-quantitative-data
Video: Regression Line Example (9:26) (Khan Academy)
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics-probability/describing-relationships-quantitative-data/residuals-least-squares-rsquared/v/regression-line-example
To complete your submission, categorize which market structure (pure competition, monopolistic competition, oligopoly, or pure monopoly) applies to your company. Describe this market structure. How does it affect the problem you are researching?
Remember that these tasks draw not only upon your quantitative and data analysis/interpretation skills, but also upon your communication skills. How might you go about presenting your findings to the company's decision makers? Describe how you will present your information in a way that will be understandable to laypeople and will convince them of the merit of your processes (and ultimately, your recommendations).
As a managerial economics student and professional, you are encouraged to use your own experience, understanding, and knowledge of business and industry structure to drive your analysis. Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:
Research: In this section, you will apply economic theory and quantitative analysis to your research topic.
A. Describe the relationship between the economic factors you identified and the presented issue.
B. Using mathematical concepts, illustrate the relationships between economic factors and the issue.
C. Describe the market structure of your organization's industry.
D. Determine how the market structure of the industry influences the issue. Support your response with relevant examples from the case
Guidelines for Submission: This milestone assignment should be written in essay format and submitted as a Microsoft Word document. The submission should be 4 to 6 pages in length (including the initial problem statement) with double spacing, 12-point Times New Roman font, and one-inch margins. You should use current APA style guidelines for your citations and reference list. Note that at least five outside information sources are required overall for this project, although you might find that more are necessary to satisfy the requirements of the final presentation.
As necessary, copy and paste any data analysis and/or graphics from Excel into your Word document for submission. You may include your original Excel documents as supplementary material if you believe this will strengthen your contribution.
Case Study:
About American Airlines, Inc. Founded in 1930, American Airlines, formerly AmericanAirways, Inc., was the result of the consolidation of more than 80 small airlines into the Aviation Corporation. Today, American Airlines is one of the largest airlines in the world. American Airlines, American Eagle and the AmericanConnection® carrier serve 260 airports in more than 50 countries and territories with, on average, more than 3,500 daily flights. American's network covers points throughout North America, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe and the Pacific. American has five major cornerstone markets: New York, Los Angeles, Dallas/Fort Worth, Chicago and Miami, where its network resources are concentrated and connect some of the largest U.S. population centers for business travelers. The combined network fleet numbers more than 900 aircrafts. On an average day, American Airlines and American Eagle welcome almost 300,000 customers onto their aircraft, help book flights and answer questions for 110,000 customers who call their reservation centers, deliver 250,000 checked bags to their final destination, and load and transport more than 2.7 million pounds of cargo.
The Business Challenge
American Airlines and its associated companies have been winning accolades such as the 2011 World Airline Awards, for exemplary customer service, and this remains a key mandate for the airline. A stellar mobility strategy is vital for AA to maintain these soaring standards. American Airlines uses a wide variety of mobile devices depending on the needs of the specific work group running on the best available cellular carrier or AmericanAirlines dedicated Wi-Fi network. Mobile applications include Bag Scanning/Aircraft Load and Balance Finalization, Driver Information on Routings, Flight Information for Baggage Carts, and are also used by Fleet Service Clerks responsible for transportation of luggage and freight, Lost or Misrouted Bag Tracking, Cargo Warehouse Freight Location Tracking, Airport Agent Customer Assistance and Dynamic Manning. Prior to implementation of SOTI MobiControl, individual business areas or their service providers wrote custom deployment software and lockdown security as part of the application. This was very expensive and beyond pushing new software to devices, this provided no remote management capability and was generally ineffective for Mobile Device Management. Initially, American looked to MobiControl to fulfill requirements for the Application Management and Remote Control capabilities for remote field troubleshooting, training, and software issues that could be solved remotely. The initial deployment allowed the Development and Help Desks to remotely solve end-user issues (training) and specific software issues that could be not be managed otherwise.
The Solution
SOTI MobiControl was recommended to American Airlines by Stratix Corporation as a tactical solution to Mobile Device Management for the Airport Services Division. As mobile requirements and product suites have grown, American has subsequently looked at MobileIron, AirWatch and Afaria. American's Airport Services division initially set up MobiControl in a lab environment at its headquarters. Following some pilot deployments of the applications mentioned above, the Cargo Division saw the success Airport Services was having and took the next step, which was deploying MobiControl in a production data center on a Virtual Machine. These deployments were supported by SOTI over the phone and went very smoothly. In addition to the original requirements, the Cargo division used MobiControl to help gauge and manage Battery usage on the devices. They have also implemented a scripting tool that drives test cases through the remote control feature that greatly aids in testing and debugging in the Development Cycle. Prior to the deployment, American had 500 mobile devices in the field, but today, 4,000 devices are managed by MobiControl, and AA has plans to deploy thousands more
The Result
American Airlines is very satisfied with MobiControl. Because of the operational nature of an airline, MobiControl's easy to use management console fits American's requirements. American has been able to easily implement customized role-based usage of the Management Console for Business Unit SMEs, Developers, Help Desk, Deployment and Administration roles. Additionally, they are starting to implement platforms beyond Windows (Android, Apple) and support consumer grade devices, and looking forward to implementing the Web-based console. Based on saving on individual development, lower hardware costs, help desk function, the ROI across the organization is easily in the tens of millions of dollars. American's mobile help desk, the Stratix Service Center, estimates 90 to 95 percent of the tickets created can be solved over the phone with MobiConto
The Future
As mobility has grown, American's organization has grown with it. There is now an Enterprise Mobility Solutions department that looks at Mobile Services Management from a holistic approach. This is from device evaluation, purchase, staging, carrier billing, common software services (VPN, Active Directory) and Mobile Device Management. Up to now, MDM has purely been looked at an operational device level. American is actively planning for a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) environment is looking to utilize MobiControl to help manage, enforce policy and the security of the AA network. AA currently has the MobiControl deployment server and database positioned in one physical datacenter with clients distributed across every airport that American Airlines or AmericanEagle serves domestically as well as select international locations. Growth plans include installation of additional deployment servers geographically dispersed to provide better business continuity in event of a data center disaster.