Your friend George is going to start a new business servicing and repairing cell phones. He asks you what is the difference in characteristics of a service business over manufacturing a product. Name and describe the four characteristics of services using his business as an example (often referred to as the 4I’s of service). Explain to him why this makes it a bit harder to market.

What is a marketing channel system and value network?can be use in Hypermarkets in Oman?

Question 1:

Suppose that your group is the executive sales team for Starbucks. The CEO has just proposed lowering the price of regular coffee and increasing the price of specialty coffee drinks. The belief is that our customers are sensitive to a price change of regular coffee but much less sensitive to a change in the price of specialty coffee. As such, your team is tasked with providing an analysis on this proposal. In order to provide your analysis, you need to find out if the CEO’s theory about customer behavior, and their sensitivity to price changes for regular and specialty coffee, is correct. In order to find out how sensitive customers are to a price change, you will need to calculate the price elasticity of demand, describe what that means, and evaluate the impact on revenues.

For this activity, use the standard percent change formula (also known as the point method).

You have been given the following data on prices and changes in quantity demanded.

Regular Coffee:

Current Price per cup: $2.00 and quantity sold per month is 1 million

Proposed Price per cup: $1.80 and estimated quantity sold per month is 1.5 million

Specialty Coffee:

Current Price per cup: $4.00 and quantity sold per month is 50 million

Proposed Price per cup: $4.40 and estimated quantity sold per month is 47 million

Part 1: Find the elasticity of demand for regular and specialty coffee.

Part 2: Find the total change in revenue for regular and specialty coffee.

Part 3: Use a demand curve graph to explain the change in revenue. You only need to show the demand curve on your graph.

You may upload a picture/file of your graph or use the creately template.

Question 2:

Suppose that your group is the executive sales team for McDonalds. The CEO has given your team a proposal; To analyze the impact of raising the price of the Big Mac by 10% and raising the price of regular fries by 10%.

In order to provide your analysis, you need to find out how sensitive customers will be to a price change of Big Macs and fries. In order to find out how sensitive customers are to a price change, you will need to calculate the price elasticity of demand, describe what that means, and evaluate the impact on revenues.

For this activity, use the standard percent change formula (also known as the point method).

You have been given the following data on prices and changes in quantity demanded.

  Big Mac:

Current Big Mac Price: $2

Current Big Mac monthly sales: 1 million

Estimated monthly Big Mac sales at the new price: 980,000

Regular Fries:

Current regular fry Price: $1.50

Current regular fry monthly sales: 2 million

Estimated regular fry monthly sales at the new price: 1.4 million

Part 1: Find the elasticity of demand for the Big Mac and fries.

Part 2: Find the total change in revenue for the Big Mac and fries.

Part 3: Use a demand curve graph to explain the change in revenue. You only need to show the demand curve on your graph.

You may upload a picture/file of your graph or use the creately template.

PROVIDE NOTES FOR EACH TOPIC

Inflation and investments.
Security Market Analysis.
Risk and Return in portfolio Management. Analysis of risk & return, concept of total risk, factors contributing to total risk,
systematic and unsystematic risk, Risk & risk aversion.
Diversification and Techniques of Risk
Reduction.

1. What are the strengths and weaknesses of using a Gantt chart for representing a project plan? How about a Network diagram and a PERT diagram? When they should be used ? Is one method “better” than the other? Should we combine them together?

Please No handwritten work.

INTRODUCTION: The sun was setting and Arun Mittra was having the last sip of his coffee. He had not expected the day to start in such a strange fashion — and to say the least, the experience had not been very pleasant. The memories of that day kept rushing back and unsettled him more. That morning, the meeting had again started on an acrimonious note and had continued in the same vein until it was over. It was the same old story of choosing a vendor for the supply of one of the critical subassemblies for the assembly and manufacture of voltage stabilizers, the top product of A-CAT Corp. As Mittra noted, the way the manufacturing lead times are becoming the focal points with other manufacturers/competitors, A-CAT will be lucky if it survives the onslaught with their labored, never ending decision-making process. BACKGROUND: Vendor selection and management was always a tricky issue for A-CAT, and it always upset Mittra, vice president of A-CAT Corp. There were many contradictions and it was always a bone of contention between various departments within the organization. Purchasing, Finance, Manufacturing, Quality, and Sales and Service, became part of the discussion. There were four prominent suppliers vying for the contract, which was usually given on the basis of supply history, delivery promptness, quality, cost, salvage policy and intangible goodwill. THE COMPANY: A-CAT Corp. (A-CAT) was one of the leading producers of electrical appliances. It was a mid-sized manufacturer and distributor of domestic electrical appliances, and largely catered to the price-sensitive rural population. The company owned and operated two medium-sized manufacturing units in a sleepy town called Gondia, in one of the remote districts in Vidarbha, ironically a backward region in the most progressive state of India, Maharashtra. A-CAT had an alliance partnership with Jupiter Inc. for the production of cabinets and had a collaborative venture with Global Electricals for manufacturing TV signal boosters and battery chargers. A-CAT’s manufacturing units had been in operation since 1986. The budget year 2010-2011 showed annual sales of $9,800,000 and employed about 40 or more employees. The voltage regulators manufactured by A-CAT were used for many different purposes, although the focus was on its flagship product, VR500, a voltage regulator of 500 volt-amperes specifically used in households as a protective device for refrigerators and television sets, so as to protect the latter from the vagaries of load fluctuations and/or frequent power failures, which were very common phenomena in this backward region of Vidarbha. The primary functional departments of A-CAT were its Purchasing Department, Design Department, Manufacturing Department and Sales/Service departments. Rather than compete with the large-scale operations prevalent in similar types of industry, A-CAT preferred to focus on the rural segment. It offered nearly 100 different models of various electrical appliances for household use, including TV signal boosters, transformers, FM radio kits, electronic ballasts, battery chargers and voltage regulators. The broad range of products catered to the rural population, thus sticking to A-CAT’s policy of catering to the low end of the market segment in and around Vidarbha. The low end refers to the customers who were quite sensitive towards pricing. In the opinion of top-level management, there was more opportunity in this segment of the market, and management had been proved right. THE ISSUE: In choosing an important component (transformer) for A-CAT’s voltage regulator VR500, the objective was to choose the best supplier. The company decided to consider efficiency, power factor, losses, turn ratio and cost. Out of these five criteria, the first three lent themselves only to qualitative comparison, while for the last two criteria, quantitative information was easily available. Over the years, A-CAT had been relying on four major suppliers of transformers, and these had the brand names Ideal, Dolphin, Boss and Freedom. The company always knew with its focus on only these four vendors that it was missing out on opportunities to explore other options. It was also aware that these were by no means the only feasible ones, but to keep decision making to a less complex level, it arbitrarily decided to compare only these four. The decision making, though quantitative in nature, involved a lot of qualitative options and hence a lot of subjectivity. The consensus ranking, along with one-on-one comparison data, was available to the group of decision makers, as the performance of each brand under various criteria was on record, but the problem the whole group faced was how to make a rational and comprehensive framework for structuring the decision problem. Though the data was not concrete in nature, the comparative evaluations were thrashed out through deliberations and discussions. And the most notable and at the same time surprising aspect was that everyone seemed to agree with the process. In order to bring in their judgments about various criteria in the hierarchy, decision makers compared the criteria in a pair-wise manner. The need was to decide which one of the criteria was more important than the others in selecting the best transformer. The decision had to be made and priorities had to be set as to which criterion was more important for A-CAT in achieving its objective, and how much more important it was than the other criteria. The company had plenty of available data to fall back on (see Exhibits 1 to 3), but it was still not sure how best to utilize it and prepare an action plan. The company needed an approach to take decision making to the next level. It was aware of certain methodologies that helped to improve the decision-making process; it was not the lack of knowledge regarding the tools that was hampering the decision making, but the experience in applying the tools. THE OBJECTIVE: To select the best transformer brand/model for VR500 (out of the available alternatives). • Four Alternatives: Dolphin, Ideal, Boss, and Freedom • Four Criteria for Selection: 1- Efficiency, 2-Power, 3-Losses, 4-Cost. • Scale of pair-wise comparison: 1 - 3 - 5 - 7 – 9.  1 - Equal importance: Two elements contribute equally to the objective.  3 - Moderate importance: Experience and judgment slightly favor one element over the other.  5 - Strong importance: Experience and judgment strongly favor one element over the other.  7 - Very strong importance: One element is favored strongly over the other; its dominance is demonstrated in practice.  9 - Extreme importance: Evidence favoring one element over the other is of the highest possible order of affirmation. THE DECISION: The situation called for something out-of-the-box, as the important elements of the decisions were difficult to quantify or compare, and also the communication among the team members was impeded by their different perspectives. The aim was to judge all the alternatives without any prejudices and biases. Mittra knew that, being human, there was always a chance of being swayed by extraneous considerations — we all have our predilections and this plays a great part in our decisions, which are always thought of as rational by those making them. It was more or less clear to all concerned that there were lot of issues involved, and this would bring to the fore a lot of frayed tempers and bloated egos, and to end it all A-CAT had to do something about it. The decision making had to be formulated in a manner in which all concerned got their say, and the decision had to be taken without compromising the objectivity of the process. Wriggling out of the situation was very difficult and seemed almost impossible; all the functional departments were working at cross purposes and were seen to be almost at loggerheads. The perception always varied and day by day it was becoming very difficult to make a decision in favor of one or the other supplier without annoying one functional department or another. Not satisfied with the answers and solutions, Mittra decided to take a collective view. To make it really collaborative, he asked the group of decision makers to postpone the decision until they arrived at what they thought was the correct decision. Since they were on an unending rollercoaster ride of arguments and counter-arguments, Mittra put his foot down and asked the warring factions in the group to come up with some quantitative way of dealing with the issue at hand.

1. Rate Arun Mittra as a (Corporate) leader.  List any strong and weak points
2. Discuss the current decision-making process at A-CAT.  Evaluate it’s; Complexity, Effectiveness and Accuracy.
3. Suggest ways to improve A-CAT’s decision-making process.  Make specific recommendations to improve the process.
4. Have the quality of the comparison tables used in this case study helped or hindered your ability to resolve this case study? Why?
5. Do you agree or disagree with A-CAT’s decision, during this vendor selection process, to limit the number of potential vendors to four in order to simplify the process?  Explain your answer.

Describe some advantages of using computer technology (e.g., smart cards, databases, etc.) for identification cards and identification systems, as compared to the current Social Security card and number system. Describe some serious potential risks or problems of using computerized ID cards/systems. Consider both private and governmental uses.

Answer in 3 paragraphs. Like an essay.

How could you apply the QFD technique in the develop of a new medical device? Explain with an example.

During the systems development life cycle (SDLC), certain key problems discovered in the later stages could be directly traced back to inadequate and/or poor efforts in the requirements phase and industry studies show that over 50% of systems problems belong to this case. In addition, as mentioned in this week lecture notes "the cost of errors in requirements that weren’t discovered until later" may go up to 1,000 times. As a systems analyst, what should we do to minimize this problem? How might this be avoided?

Please no handwritten notes as those are hard to read.

Derive the equations to find the position, velocity, and acceleration in simple harmonic motions.

Organization Analysis " Thyssenkrupp Engineered Plastics ".

Process design: What is/are the transformation processes?

1. Subsidiary Company reported the following net income and dividends for the years indicated:

Parent acquired 75% of Subsidiary’s common stock on January 1, 20X6. On that date, the fair value of Sub’s net assets was equal to the book value. Parent uses the equity method in accounting for its ownership in Sub and reported a balance of $259,800 in its investment account on December 31, 20X8.

1. What amount did Parent pay to acquire Subsidiary’s shares?

2. What was the fair value of Sub’s net assets on January 1, 20X6?

3. What amount will be assigned to the NCI shareholders in the consolidated balance sheet prepared at December 31, 20X8?

12.Calculating EACYou are evaluating two different silicon wafer milling machines. The Techron I costs $265,000, has a 3-year life, and has pretax operating costs of $41,000 per year. The Techron II costs $330,000, has a 5-year life, and has pretax operating costs 196 of $52,000 per year. For both milling machines, use straight-line depreciation to zero over the project’s life and assume a salvage value of $25,000. If your tax rate is 21 percent and your discount rate is 9 percent, compute the EAC for both machines. Which do you prefer? Why?

13.Cost-Cutting ProposalsStarset Machine Shop is considering a 4-year project to improve its production efficiency. Buying a new machine press for $670,000 is estimated to result in $245,000 in annual pretax cost savings. The press falls in the 5-year MACRS class, and it will have a salvage value at the end of the project of $55,000. The press also requires an initial investment in spare parts inventory of $20,000, along with an additional $2,500 in inventory for each succeeding year of the project. If the shop’s tax rate is 23 percent and the discount rate is 8 percent, should the company buy and install the machine press?

Write a pseudo code program for a goal-based agent. The goal of the agent is to find the exit of a labyrinth.

• The agent is not omniscient
• The agent can sense if it is next to a wall (in front, left or right)
• The agent can turn 90 degrees to the right or left
• The agent can drive 1unit forward

The maze is constructed of paths that are 1 unit across (wide)

Show a maze of your choosing and illustrate the path taken from start to exit according to your program (example shown here).