Day $1$ Technology Driven Decision Making Team Project

Due Date: April $2$ at the end of the class period

Points: $35$

Day $1$ Objectives

$$ Practice using data in a business context

$$ Understand the importance of providing accurate information to decision makers

$$ Practice using SQL and Excel in combination to answer business questions

$$ Understand the power and flexibility of Excel Pivot Tables

$$ Learn techniques for validating query results from large data sets

$$ Increase business writing communication skills

Scenario Description

It is March $2,2016$ and your manager, $($me$),$ needs your help to gather information I will need for a meeting that starts in $80$ minutes. My boss, the WWImporters VP of Operations, has asked me to join a corporate strategic planning session to provide key performance data to the strategic planning committee, which is an executive level committee made up of the VPs from all the functional areas. The strategic planners are considering a new marketing strategy for customers who are not in a buying group. To ensure the marketing strategy is appropriately focused, they are seeking information on customer buying patterns over the previous two years based on order date, customer category, and customer location. I know the necessary information is available in the corporate database and you are the resident experts in getting data out of the database and organizing it in a coherent way. I need you to get me the information before I go into the meeting. This is very important and I am trusting you to quickly provide accurate and useful information that will help the strategic planning committee to effectively structure the new marketing strategy.

Information Request

Use the WWImporters data dictionary and data models to build a query that will extract appropriate data from the WWImporters database and then use that data to model the following information.

$1.$ What is the dollar amount of the orders placed by non$-$buying group customers in $2014$ and $2015$ in total, by year, and by quarter for each customer category?

$2.$ What are the top five states by total orders and the top five states by orders within each customer category for the assessment period?

$3.$ Are there other meaningful order characteristics$/$trends based on order date, customer category, and$/$or customer location?

Deliverables

$1.$ Create an Excel decision support tool to organize and present the requested information. The tool should include a PivotTable along with any other features you believe will be useful to help the strategic planning committee understand the data. Include a tab in your Excel file with the SQL code you composed to extract the data from the database.

$2.$ Compose a business memo to your manager, $($me$),$ explaining the decision support tool you have created, some interpretation of the output of the tool, and some suggestions for how to use the tool to further explore the data.

$3.$ By the end of the class period, one team member should send both your Excel tool and memo as attachments in an email to farragm$2$@miamioh.edu and copy all team members on the message.