Data Analysis and Reporting

After analysis of the errors that were committed, the total number of errors summed to 277. When the figure was broken into five areas, sales accounted for 145 errors, marketing 60, product management 45, order process 27and transaction process was zero. Concerned to quality improvement and efficiency in the operations all aligned to lean six sigma approach, wanted to understand what does these mean into percentages so that by glimpse look of it you can be able to understand the effort than they need to be thrown behind each area. According to my analysis as shown in the excel spreadsheet, transition errors counted for 0%, order process 9.74%, product management 16.25%, marketing 21.66% and lastly, sales area accounted for 52%. However, that not being enough, if consider what does these errors mean to the entire process, they only take 0.004%.

There are particular things that I feel they are contributing to these errors and correctional measures should be taken so that efficiency and quality management can be realized in the operations within the department. Borrowing from the Six Sigma, I believe the following are some of the major causes of these errors; lack of the training to help identify appropriate corrective actions for human errors, lack of the management commitment to ensure it offers maximum support to all areas, lack of the effective correctional system because we find errors repeating in the following months which means there is less effort that was put to reduce or rather eliminate occurrence of errors, lack of the sales follow up which should not be ignored because sales reps have to follow up on every single lead, no matter what (Tenera & Pinto, 2014).

Similarly, unrealistic forecasting where sales seem not to use data available accurately to do forecasting. It is of great importance that sales representative should consider using data analytics which I believe will play a significant role in improving the accuracy and reliability of forecasts thus avoiding some errors. There is also a need to differentiate between tactic and strategy because a tactic that works today is unlikely to continue to work over the long run. It is therefore important the sales team, marketing team and product management to continually review their tactics to fit dynamics in the market.

considering the repeats of errors that are made, I do recommend that correctional measure should be taken where error follow-up forms should be examined by the quality control supervisor, administrative supervisor and the head of the department. The causes of errors should be investigated adequately and revocable errors corrected to avoid a repeat of them.

In the defining phase, the causes and characteristics of problems and the damages they caused were investigated should be investigated and detailed report to the concerned area be issued. The distribution of errors at sales, marketing, product management and order process should be exclusively examined in the measuring phase. Problem-solving activities should be applied regarding the prevention of the occurrence of errors. Finally, the implementations for reducing all these errors should be initiated in the improvement phase.

Upon carrying out the descriptive analysis, I found labour cost in all areas was 15,780,000, a number of employees were 2820, repair cost was 2350,529, shipping cost 2880, utility cost 33000, facility cost 1980000, supply cost 8230, T &E 281125 and the total revenue was 83,400,000. Further I carried cost analysis per each area and found out sales cost was 9,010,640 which is 43.24%, marketing cost was 3,491,325 which is 16.75%, product management was 3,823,625 which is 18.35%, order process cost was 2,639,294 which was 12.66% and lastly, transaction was 1, 874,880 which was 9.00% of the total cost. All these figures are well articulated in the excel spreadsheet. However, the question of interest is why the area of sales as almost 50% of the total cost. From the analysis, the area of sales experiences high cost which is purely contributed by the error cost of the repair which accounts for 25% of the total cost in this particular area.

Considering the Pareto chart above, it clearly shows the major area that demands the attention is sales. It has the highest count which is then followed by the product management and then marketing follows in the third position. If three main counts will be addressed, the management will have dealt with about 80% of the costs. Looking at the cumulative line, it is steep which simply show that the first three problems rapidly add to a high percentage of the total cost.

Another important area of the consideration and analysis is the trend of the cost within the 12 months in the 5 areas within the department. Upon analysis, cost seems to follow the same pattern in all areas within the department. During the first three months, they are constant and on May they increase to the pick. However, they all decrease in the month of June, remain within the constant range until the tenth month where they all shoot up in the 11th month and later, they decrease on the 12th month. Considering the trend on the revenue side, it is only in three areas where there is revenue generation which are sales, marketing and product management while order and transaction process records zero revenue in all twelve months. For the sales, 5th and 11th month records the highest revenue, where on the same months, the cost incurred is highest. However, for marketing and product management areas, they have constant revenue for all 12 months.

Similarly, considering the profit analysis, sales recorded the highest profit, followed by product management and then the marketing department. Other areas which are Order process and Transaction did not record a single value of the profit but rather recorded losses. In this case, would, therefore, conclude that order and transaction process were cost centres while sales, marketing and product management were profit centres. However, though we had two cost centres, the department was able to make a profit of 90,539,959. On the excel spreadsheet have also done an analysis of each area focusing on profit, cost and revenue.

When I looked on the data I have, have made the following hypotheses; Null Hypothesis: There is no significant difference between sales and marketing cost an Alternative hypothesis: There is a significant difference between sales and marketing cost. Using a 5% level of the significance, I carried out calculation and analysis as shown in the spreadsheet and obtained a test statistics of 0.63. Using this value and 14 degrees of freedom, obtained a p-value of 0.53. From these results, since P-value (0.5369) is greater than the level of the significance level hence we fail to reject the Null Hypothesis. Therefore, there is no significant difference between sales and marketing cost (Greenland et al….2016).

References

Tenera, A., & Pinto, L. C. (2014). A Lean Six Sigma (LSS) project management improvement model. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 119, 912-920.

Greenland, S., Senn, S. J., Rothman, K. J., Carlin, J. B., Poole, C., Goodman, S. N., & Altman, D. G. (2016). Statistical tests, P values, confidence intervals, and power: a guide to misinterpretations. European journal of epidemiology, 31(4), 337-350.