Ted Ralley, the director of marketing research of a large manufacturer

The Case is

Ted Ralley, the director of marketing research of a large manufacturer of spare parts for automobiles, is working on the sales forecast for the next year. He knows that forecast errors are costly and wants to forecast the sales as accurately as possible. He collected the data on quarterly sales for the previous four years and ran several forecasts using time series forecasting methods, but he was still concerned. Ted believes that economic activity and oil prices has a significant impact of auto parts sales and decided to check if the sales can be predicted better using econometric variables.

The first Attachment is the case assignment.

The second is the unfinished excel document. Need to finish the ranking tab, etc.

Based on the info from the Case description I need to create a management Report. The report needs to follow this format and include graphs in the analysis and why I ranked each one either 1,2 or 3 on the ranking tab.

Format of a Management Report for Case Analysis

Executive Summary

This section should appear on a separate page at the beginning of the report. It should be limited to a maximum of 200 words and give a very brief summary of the background, the problem, the method of analysis and the recommendations. Please note that this summary must have all four of these elements.

Background

In this section, the context of the problem and the current situation is described from the case. Only the essential details should be covered and this section should NOT be a synopsis of the case. This section should be limited to a maximum of 250 words.

Problem

A succinct statement of the problem/ dilemma/ issue should be stated here. Be careful to identify the real problem and not the symptoms of the problem.

Analysis

This is the most important section of the report. A clear, step-by-step description of how the data in the case was analyzed should be given. Technical terms should be kept to a minimum as the focus is on producing a document that can be understood by management. Details of calculations and the technical details of the analysis should be appended to the report (usually in the form of Excel spreadsheets). Summary tables and graphs may be used within this section to illustrate the important results of the analysis. It is important to cite any references in the text to support your analysis.

Conclusions and Recommendations

In this section, the recommended solution to the problem or resolution of the dilemma should be presented. The reason for the recommendation should be justified and the implications of the solution articulated. Be sure that your recommendations are related to the stated problem and avoid going off at tangents.

Bibliography

A list of the books, articles, websites, software etc. consulted or used in understanding the situation, writing the report and generating the solution should be presented. These references should be in APA format. (A great deal of time can be saved by using EndNote for this purpose. This software is available free to students from the NSU library website. It can be installed as an MS Word add-in and the “cite while you write” function used to create in-text references and the list of references in the correct format.)

Appendices

The detailed workings and calculations used should be presented here and referred to at the appropriate place in the text so that readers (i.e. managers) who require details can determine where they are located. These will usually take the form of MS Excel spreadsheets or other outputs from any software used. The most convenient way to do this is to imbed these files into the report as this will enable you to submit a single file for the assignment/ case analysis. [In MS Word this can be achieved by selecting the Insert tab (second from the left), then Object (second last block), click “Create from File”, browse for the correct file, click “Display as Icon” and then press OK.]

Mike Bendixen June 27, 2009