Group Project Submission Guidelines for analyzing Eastern Mountain Sports data

The deliverables are the submissions you will be posting to the Assignment Drop Box. You must submit both files to receive a grade for this project.

You must submit these two items:

1. The report on the Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS) which includes the three pieces of data analysis you are doing for the company.

2. The download of the Excel spreadsheet with EMS’s sales order data and your analysis. Your analysis must be in the original Excel workbook you were provided for the project.Forming Groups

This is a group project. As working in groups is one of the course learning outcomes, no project submitted by an individual will be graded.

There are to be 4 people to each group. You may use the same group as in Project 1 or find new people to work with. Groups larger than 4 will be penalized. Groups smaller than 4 must be approved by the instructor.

Groups must be registered with your instructors before your class in Week 10 or be penalized 10%. Each group must designate a student to send the first and last names of its members to your instructor. This includes groups that have not changed from Project 1. Your instructor will send you the data set you will be working on by return message. No project will be marked from a group that is not registered with the instructor. The Assignment

Your group is tasked with the objective of analyzing the data set using the tools you have learned in

the course and providing THREE (3) insights into the Eastern Mountain Sports business.

1. You are provided with a data set with a large number of attributes and variables relating to the orders for a sports and outdoor recreation retail chain, Eastern Mountain Sports. The first step is to

familiarize yourself with the organization by browsing through their website at www.ems.com

2. The next step is to review the data set. In the workbook you are provided is a spreadsheet called Documentation which describes the variables in the data set. Review these to get a idea of the questions your data set can answer and also, so that you use the data appropriately. You will be looking for relationships between variables in the data set that can help you understand the company’s products, customers, sales and or any other aspect of the operations of the business better.

3. You are expected to use the data analysis tools you have learned in the course. Here are some guidelines:

a. Filter your data, use hide/unhide, the copy visible cells only, etc. to extract a subset of the data to focus your analysis for each insight.

b. At least one insight should be the result of appropriately using some of the IF family of functions.

c. One insight should be from the result of using the Subtotal function appropriately.

d. At least one insight should be from the result of using a three-variable Pivot Table.

e. All three of your insights should have appropriate visualizations. The charts are expected to reflect the lessons learned about formatting and presenting data in charts outlined in Data Analysis Lesson 4 and Lesson 9.

You and your group will be marked on the sophistication of the analysis and the appropriateness of the tools being used.