For this assignment, you will use skills acquired through practical laboratory exercises to automate a business process, and to visualize the impact of the automation.
Costs
Alfred and Bernita are the semi-retired co-owners of the bookshop, and do not take a salary.
Celestine, however, is a part-time employee, with total employment costs of $22 per hour. Celestine is also entitled to four weeks of paid annual leave, during which a casual replacement is required at a cost of $33 per hour.
Fixed costs such as rent and insurance are $2900 per year, and utilities costs are $140 per month.
Task 1 - Costs of operating the business
Using Excel, create a spreadsheet called operating_costs.xlsx that calculates the projected annual outgoing costs of running Book Box.
Your spreadsheet should be configured such that the working hours, hourly rates, and fixed and utility costs can be varied easily.
Task 2 - Sales team offers
Using Excel, process the history of purchases spreadsheet and use appropriate charts to visualize:
How the prices paid di?ered for each sta? member; and How the prices paid have changed over time
Describe your findings in your ePortfolio (approximately 250 words), and attach the Excel file to your page.
Process automation
Alfred and Bernita want to improve the consistency of how they pay for and price books.
They'd like to standardize on three standard price o?ers, and have designed the following process to determine how to allocate them, including the option of rejecting the book altogether.
Task 3 - Automation
Using Excel, create a spreadsheet page that automates the above process, allowing a member of the team to enter whether the book is hardcover, its publication year, and its condition, and receive a price to offer.
Ensure that you include enough text and formatting to make your spreadsheet usable by a member of the Book Box team, or by a University lecturer.
Your spreadsheet should be configured such that the Low, Medium and High prices can be varied easily.
Describe how you automated the process (approx 150 words), and attach your Excel file to your ePortfolio.
Task 4 - Price setting
Using Excel and the historical data you have available, determine sets of prices which meet the objectives of the following scenarios:
Scenario one: Total o?er prices are approximately the same as for the historical data
Scenario two: Assuming all books purchased are sold, allow all sta? to draw the same wage as Celestine.
Describe the strategy you used to find appropriate prices for each scenario
Answer:
Task 1:
Cost per hour for the Celestine and the casual replacement, along with the number of hours worked by them in a day is saved in the file. On the basis of this information, the annual cost for the salaries is calculated and then it is added to the other costs of the shop.
From the data, it is observed that a major portion of the total annual cost of the shop is for the salary cost which is paid to the Celestine per year which sums up to $34320 which is the 80% of the total cost.
Task 2:
a.
The above graph shows that how the prices offered differ for each staff member who works at the shop. With the variation of the bar peak for each staff member, it can be concluded that Celestine offers a high amount of price for each book. Every year the prices offered by him increase gradually. Whereas Alfred offers a minimum amount of price for the books published in the same year.
b.
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The above graph shows that how the prices paid have changed over the time. Throughout all the years there is not a fixed transition in the change of prices but a random variation with the highest amount paid in 1993.
Task 3:
In this, the quality, publication date and type cover of the book is entered by the user and then a final offer is generated by it. If the quality of the book is terrible then irrespective of the publication date and type, the book is rejected and no offer is made for that book as it is not purchased.
If the quality of the book is poor, then irrespective of the publication date and the type, a very low price is offered for the book and that is the final offer.
If the quality of the book is good, but the book’s publication date is older than 15 years, then the user doesn’t care about the type and offers a low price for the book but if the publication date is 15 years or newer then the type of the book is considered and if the book is paperback then a medium price is offered and a high price is offered for hardcover books.
Task 4:
On the basis of the historical data provided, and the automata developed in the task 3, it can be observed that the prices offered in historical data was not anywhere same as the total prices offered by the automata. For historical data, there was not any fixed way to determine the price for the books, but now with the development of the automata a consistent price offered can be observed for all the books in it.
