Learning Activity #1 - Theme 1

The article, The Balanced Scorecard, as well as this week’s readings discusses the balanced scorecard.

Artemus Gordon is mentoring a new management trainee. The new trainee is unfamiliar with the balance scorecard and its use in the production department. Artemus says,

“The best tool a manager has is a balanced scorecard because...”.

Finish the statement by explaining the purpose of a balance scorecard and how it functions.

Then, compare the value of the SWOT tool to the value of the Balance Scorecard. Do you agree with Artemus that the Balance Scorecard has more value or are we comparing apples and oranges?

Learning Activity #2 - Theme 2

Traditionally, the managerial function of controlling is not to be confused with control in the behavior or in the manipulative sense. The control function does not imply that managers should attempt to control or to manipulate the personalities, values, attitudes, or emotions of his or her employees. Instead, this function of management concerns the manager’s role in taking necessary actions to ensure that the work-related activities of employees are consistent with, and contribute toward the accomplishment of organizational and departmental objectives.

Research the concept of the virtual organization. Then, explain how a manager can measure work that is performed when the employee may be 5,000 miles away? Be sure to consider the virtual and global organizations and how a manager would control and measure work from afar.

PLEASE PROVIDE REFERENCES FOR ALL WORK CITED

Consider someone who is thinking about buying a new car, and trying to decide which one to buy. They plan to use the car mostly for commuting. They live 35 miles from work, and will commute 190 days per year. They know that the cost of gas in the Bay Area is currently around $3.00/gallon, the cost of electricity is around $0.15/kWh. For simplicity, they decide to assume that those prices won’t change, and that inflation will be zero, for the next five years. After five years they plan to sell the car. [20 points]

They have gathered the following information:

For both cars, they assume that insurance, maintenance, and other costs will be $2000/year. The interest rate is 3.0%/year.

a. Calculate the capital recovery factor. (5 points)

b. Which car has the most favorable net present value? Show your work for each vehicle. (5 points per car, 10 points total)

c. The U.S. government currently offers a $7,500 federal tax credit for the Nissan Leaf. Should this change the purchase decision, assuming the buyer will owe more than $7,500 in taxes during the purchase year? (5 points)

To better understand the importance of organization structure in your life, do the following assignment.

Select one of the following situations to organize:

·       A travel agency

·       A sports rental (such as Jet Skis or snowmobiles) in a resort area

·       A bakery

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1.     Write down the mission or purpose of the organization in a few sentences.

2.     What are the specific tasks to be completed to accom- plish the mission?

3.     Based on the specifics in question 2, develop an organization chart. Each position in the chart will perform a specific task or is responsible for a certain outcome.

4.     You are into your third year of operation, and your business has been very successful. You want to add a second location a few miles away. What issues will you face running the business at two locations? Draw an organization chart that includes the two business locations.

5.     Five more years go by and the business has grown to five locations in two cities. How do you keep in touch with it all? What issues of control and coordination have arisen? Draw an up-to-date organization chart and explain your rationale for it.

6.     Twenty years later you have seventy-five business locations in five states. What are the issues and problems that have to be dealt with through organizational structure? Draw an organization chart for this organization, indicating such factors as who is responsible for customer satisfaction, how you will know if customer needs are met, and how information will flow within the organization.

A1-C1

Assignment – Correlation

1. You are given the following statistics: means, standard deviations, and correlations for 4 variables. The four variables are miles per gallon, weight of car, front profile (1-Low, 0-Not Low) and the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. Four hundred cars were sampled. Answer the questions that follow.

1. __________Which costs more, (low or high) front profile vehicles
2. _________ Best predictor of MPG is
3. __________Heavier cars have a (low or high) profile front
4. __________High MPG vehicles have ‘significantly’ higher prices than low MPG vehicles(T/F)
5. _________ Weakest predictor of MPG is
6. __________Slope of the line for MPG against Low Profile Front would be (Pos, Neg or zero)
7. ____________________________________________________________ Suppose the slope of the line for MPG against Low Profile front is 5. Interpret this slope relative to the two variables.

h.__________Higher MPG vehicles have (higher or lower) profiles.

i.__________ How many cars in the sample were low profile.

SecuriCorp operates a fleet of armored cars that make scheduled pickups and deliveries in the Los Angeles area. The company is implementing an activity-based costing system that has four activity cost pools: Travel, Pickup and Delivery, Customer Service, and Other. The activity measures are miles for the Travel cost pool, number of pickups and deliveries for the Pickup and Delivery cost pool, and number of customers for the Customer Service cost pool. The Other cost pool has no activity measure because it is an organization-sustaining activity. The following costs will be assigned using the activity-based costing system:

The distribution of resource consumption across the activity cost pools is as follows:

Required:

Complete the first stage allocations of costs to activity cost pools.

SecuriCorp operates a fleet of armored cars that make scheduled pickups and deliveries in the Los Angeles area. The company is implementing an activity-based costing system that has four activity cost pools: Travel, Pickup and Delivery, Customer Service, and Other. The activity measures are miles for the Travel cost pool, number of pickups and deliveries for the Pickup and Delivery cost pool, and number of customers for the Customer Service cost pool. The Other cost pool has no activity measure because it is an organization-sustaining activity. The following costs will be assigned using the activity-based costing system: Driver and guard wages $ 1,180,000 Vehicle operating expense 610,000 Vehicle depreciation 490,000 Customer representative salaries and expenses 520,000 Office expenses 380,000 Administrative expenses 680,000 Total cost $ 3,860,000 The distribution of resource consumption across the activity cost pools is as follows: Travel Pickup and Delivery Customer Service Other Totals Driver and guard wages 50 % 35 % 10 % 5 % 100 % Vehicle operating expense 70 % 5 % 0 % 25 % 100 % Vehicle depreciation 60 % 15 % 0 % 25 % 100 % Customer representative salaries and expenses 0 % 0 % 90 % 10 % 100 % Office expenses 0 % 20 % 30 % 50 % 100 % Administrative expenses 0 % 5 % 60 % 35 % 100 % Required: Complete the first stage allocations of costs to activity cost pools.

SecuriCorp operates a fleet of armored cars that make scheduled pickups and deliveries in the Los Angeles area. The company is implementing an activity-based costing system that has four activity cost pools: Travel, Pickup and Delivery, Customer Service, and Other. The activity measures are miles for the Travel cost pool, number of pickups and deliveries for the Pickup and Delivery cost pool, and number of customers for the Customer Service cost pool. The Other cost pool has no activity measure because it is an organization-sustaining activity. The following costs will be assigned using the activity-based costing system:

The distribution of resource consumption across the activity cost pools is as follows:

Required:

Complete the first stage allocations of costs to activity cost pools.

Blue Bayou Middle School wants to raise money for a new sound system for its auditorium. The primary fund-raising event is a dance at which the famous disc jockey Kray Zee will play classic and not-so-classic dance tunes. Grant Hill, the music and theater instructor, has been given the responsibility for coordinating the fund-raising efforts. This is Grant’s first experience with fund-raising. He decides to put the eighth-grade choir in charge of the event; he will be a relatively passive observer.

Grant had 500 unnumbered tickets printed for the dance. He left the tickets in a box on his desk and told the choir students to take as many tickets as they thought they could sell for $5 each. In order to ensure that no extra tickets would be floating around, he told them to dispose of any unsold tickets. When the students received payment for the tickets, they were to bring the cash back to Grant, and he would put it in a locked box in his desk drawer.

Some of the students were responsible for decorating the gymnasium for the dance. Grant gave each of them a key to the money box and told them that if they took money out to purchase materials, they should put a note in the box saying how much they took and what it was used for. After 2 weeks, the money box appeared to be getting full, so Grant asked Lynn Dandi to count the money, prepare a deposit slip, and deposit the money in a bank account that Grant had opened.

The day of the dance, Grant wrote a check from the account to pay Kray Zee. The DJ said, however, that he accepted only cash and did not give receipts. So Grant took $200 out of the cash box and gave it to Kray. At the dance, Grant had Dana Uhler working at the entrance to the gymnasium, collecting tickets from students and selling tickets to those who had not pre-purchased them. Grant estimated that 400 students attended the dance.

The following day, Grant closed out the bank account, which had $250 in it, and gave that amount plus the $180 in the cash box to Principal Sanchez. Principal Sanchez seemed surprised that, after generating roughly $2,000 in sales, the dance netted only $430 in cash. Grant did not know how to respond.

Identify as many internal control weaknesses as you can in this scenario, and suggest how each could be addressed.

Directions: Complete each of the following problems. Be sure to show your work in order to receive full or partial credit. Calculators are allowed along with 1 page (1 side) of notes any any necessary statistical tables.

1. (True / False) Estimating parameters and testing hypotheses are two important aspects of descriptive statistics.

2. (True / False) A statistic is calculated from a population and a parameter is calculated from a sample.  

3. (True / False) Descriptive statistics include visual display of data, measures of central tendency, and dispersion.

What type of data (attribute, discrete numerical, continuous numerical) is each of the following variables:

4. ______________________ The manufacturer of your laptop computer

5. ______________________ The number of tickets in a movie theater

Which level of data (nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio) is each of the following variables?

6. ______________________ Your social security number

7. ______________________ Temperature in degrees Celsius

8. 1,000 names are selected from a phone book containing 50,000 people by choosing every 50^th name. Which sampling method is this?

A) Simple random sample.

B) Systematic sample.

C) Stratified sample.

D) Cluster sample.

9.From its 32 regions, the F.A.A. selects 6 regions, and then randomly audits 25 departing commercial flights in each region for compliance with legal fuel and weight requirements. This is an example of

A) simple random sampling.

B) stratified random sampling.

C) cluster sampling.

D) judgment sampling.

10. Suppose we want to estimate vaccination rates among employees in state government, and we know that our target population is 55 percent male and 45 percent female. Our budget only allows a sample size of 200. We randomly sample 110 males and 90 females. This is an example of

A) simple random sampling.

B) stratified random sampling.

C) cluster sampling.

D) judgment sampling.

11. In 2018, the mean per capita expenditures on public libraries for all 50 states was 18 with a standard deviation of 5. The data follow a bell-shaped curve.

      a.    According to the empirical rule, what percentage of the expenditures should fall between 13 and 23? ________________

2. Within what interval should approximately 99.7% of the expenditures fall? _________________

12. Find the standard normal area under the curve for each of the following