Business Analysis - Performance Lawn Case

Week 1

Part 1: PLE originally produced lawn mowers, but a significant portion of sales volume over recent years has come from the growing small-tractor market. As we noted in the case in Chapter 1, PLE sells their products worldwide, with sales regions including North America, South America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. Three years ago a new region was opened to serve China, where a booming market for small tractors has been established. PLE has always emphasized quality and considers the quality it builds into its products as its primary selling point. In the past 2 years, PLE has also emphasized the ease of use of their products. Before digging into the details of operations, Elizabeth Burke wants to gain an overview of PLE’s overall business performance and market position by examining the information provided in the database. Specifically, she is asking you to construct appropriate charts for the data in the following worksheets and summarize your conclusions from analysis of these charts.
a. Analysis on Dealer Satisfaction

There are different scale on Dealer satisfaction reported data across different regions for the past 5 years, there are different sample sizes involved per each combination of region and year, so the best way is to do a weighted average for each combination, so that we can make a contingency table as below to know the trend in history across different areas:

Line chart is the best way to visualize the data, result as below:

[pic 1]

Clearly China as the newly introduced region, there has been a learning curve process, but the satisfaction level did increased significantly over the 3 year time. But for other regions, it seems that after an improvement trend up to 2013, either flat or even deterioration. South America has been the top area with deal satisfaction, while Pacific Rim has some issue in 2014 on this part which need attention.

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