MGT555: Performance Lawn Equipment (PLE), headquartered in St.Louis, Missouri, is a privately owned designer and producer: Business Analytics Assignment, UiTM, Malaysia

Performance Lawn Equipment (PLE), headquartered in St.Louis, Missouri, is a privately owned designer and producer of traditional lawn mowers used by homeowners. In the past 10 years, PLE has added another key product, a medium-size diesel power lawn tractor with front and rear power takeoffs, Class I three-point hitches, four-wheel drive, power steering, and full hydraulics.

This equipment is built primarily for a niche market consisting of large estates, including golf and country clubs, resorts, private estates, city parks, large commercial complexes, lawn care service providers, private homeowners with five or more acres, and government (federal, state, and local) parks, building complexes, and military base.

PLE provides most of the products to dealerships, which in turn, sell directly to end users. PLE employs 1660 people worldwide. About half the workforce is based in St. Louis; 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 Southcentral states, which have the greatest, concentration of customers.

Outside In the US, PLE’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 PLE. Collection and analysis of end-user data showed that satisfaction with the products depends on high quality, easy attachment/dismount of implements, low maintenance, price value, and service.

For dealers, key requirements are high quality, parts, and feature availability, rapidly restock discounts, and timeliness of support. To help manage the company, PLE managers have developed a “balanced scorecard” of measures.

Ms. Anna has recently joined the PLE management team to oversee production operations. She has reviewed the types of data that the company collects and has assigned you the responsibility to be her chief analyst in the coming weeks.

Instructions:

Ms. Anna has asked you to do some preliminary analysis of the data in the Performance Lawn Equipment (PLE) database:

1) You need to count the number of failures in the Mower Test Data.
2) Ms. Anna has provided you with prices for PLE products for the past 5 years.

She wants you to create a new worksheet in the database to compute gross revenues by month and region, as well as worldwide totals, for each product using the data in Mower Unit Sales and Tractor Unit Sales.

3) Ms. Anna wants to gain an overview of PLE’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 conclusion from the analysis of the charts.

• Dealer Satisfaction
• End-User Satisfaction
• Complaints
• Mower Units Sales
• One-Time Delivery

4) You also need to provide statistical information by representing a descriptive statistical summary for the 2014 Customer Survey data.

5) Besides, Ms. Anna also has identified some additional questions and wants you to provide the answer.

• Are there significant differences in ratings of specific product/ service attributes in the 2014 Customer Survey data?
• Have the data in the worksheet Defects After Delivery changed significantly over the past 5 years?
• 6 Ms. Anna had a meeting with PLE’s human resource director and they discovered a concern about the high rate of turnover in its field service staff. They try to identify the characteristics of individuals that lead to greater retention. Thus, they agreed to conduct a statistical study to determine the effect of the variables of years of education, college GPA, and age when hired on retention. A sample of 40 field service engineers hired 10 years ago was

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