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Student spreadsheet for Ivey product W28526.

King’s Hawaiian Bakery, West Inc. (King’s Hawaiian), a beloved and highly regarded company, produced a line of bread products dating back to the 1950s and was inspired by a Portuguese sweet bread. The business had grown over time, adding more production facilities and expanding from Hawaii to the mainland United States in 1977. King’s Hawaiian had done minimal consumer research related to its development of new products before it hired Troy Figgins as its new head of consumer insights. In October 2018, Figgins was tasked with creating a new consumer insights department; what this department looked like and how it functioned were entirely up to him. He was eager to design a best-in-class insights team to work with new strategies, tools, and partners. King’s Hawaiian knew it had to conduct market research to uncover insights to keep pace with evolving customer needs—but how? Figgins considered his problem and possible solutions to deliver great insights.

Maya Fonseca, the marketing analyst for video streaming service FilmCast, and her colleague Rupert Cruz had to interpret the results of a conjoint analysis conducted by their company. FilmCast was a large company, competing against Videosource and Webflickstream. The marketing analysts were debating whether it made sense to lower the price of their services and if the conjoint analysis results supported this idea.

On July 1, 2020, the co-head of the logistics and planning department at Marico Ltd., based in India, was reviewing reports on various issues related to stock inventory and warehousing. After studying the reports, he found that both lost opportunity and warehousing costs for the company were high. Compounding the problem was the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which had added pressure to the company’s impending cost pressures. Initially, Marico Ltd. had thirty-three warehouses. However, after the Government of India introduced the Goods and Service Tax in 2017, various state taxes across the country were eliminated. The new law revolutionized the logistics industry and allowed Marico Ltd. to reduce the number of its warehouses to twenty-five. Could the company further reduce the number of warehouses without adversely impacting service levels?

Student Spreadsheet for product 9B20E002.

Data preparation is a necessary pre-processing step in analytics. It aims to clean the data from various resources and improve its quality for better productivity. This process includes many tasks such as fusion, cleaning, and augmentation of data. This teaching note will focus on illustrating data cleaning using the programming language Python, with all codes completed in Google Laboratory. Different solutions using the programming languages R and Microsoft Excel are also provided. To effectively illustrate the data preparation process, the relatively simple dataset Bengaluru House Prices is used. This is a relatively messy dataset with a few variables and many records, making it ideal for explaining data preparation steps.

The note provides a qualitative and quantitative overview of the North American airline and airport industries with data covering 2016 to 2020. Specifically, the data covers five airlines—American Airlines Group Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc., Southwest Airlines Co., United Airlines Holdings Inc., Air Canada, and WestJet Airlines Ltd.—and five airports—New York’s LaGuardia, Los Angeles International, Chicago’s O’Hare International, Toronto Pearson International, and Tucson International. The objective is to provide students with a basic understanding of the business and operations of the airline and airport industries.

Student Spreadsheet to accompany product W26084.

In May 2019, a senior analyst and blogger for a market research firm decided to analyze the performance and pay of various top-rated cricket players in the Indian Premier League. Teams usually spent millions of dollars acquiring players through auctions, and on coaches and other key personnel, as well as promotional campaigns. The analyst had started following the player auctions, where bids on some players had run into millions of US dollars. He wanted to take a more objective and data-driven approach toward analyzing player rankings and how far players’ salaries reflected their performance, something that was often ignored by the pundits. The analyst wondered if these claims were at all valid and decided to use data visualization techniques to determine their validity.

Dalian Bio-Chem Co. Ltd. (Bio-Chem) had been deeply involved in the field of industrial fungicides for nearly twenty years and occupied a place in both domestic and overseas markets. Since its establishment in 2003, Bio-Chem had adhered to a strategy of centralization, with industrial fungicides as its main business products. Bio-Chem was successfully listed on the A-share market in China in 2012, and it grew rapidly in the ten years that followed. Although Bio-Chem had become a leader in the field of industrial fungicides, its chairman believed that companies should not be content with the status quo. Some within the company believed Bio-Chem should carry out a diversification strategy because it had sufficient funds to do so; others thought it should carry out an integrated strategy because the downstream industry was very profitable; and others thought it should stick to a centralized strategy because the market demand for industrial fungicides was still very large, and adhering to a centralization strategy meant there would be room for growth. The chairman had to consider the opportunities and challenges of each strategy and determine which direction to take the company.

Spreadsheet to accompany product W25528.

Additional Supplement to accompany product W25528.

LenDenClub (LDC) was a primarily online platform operated by Innofin Solutions Pvt. Ltd. in the peer-to-peer lending industry in India. To offer differentiated products in a growing segment, LDC decided to focus on the untapped segment of low-salary earners. However, it was risky to serve this segment; borrowers had little credit history but often required loans immediately for emergency expenditures, and these borrowers had limited repayment capacity, so it was challenging for LDC to remain profitable. LDC responded by developing a new product based specifically on the targeted segment’s needs that allowed LDC to give small loans to more borrowers while achieving the lowest default rates. In June 2020, with preliminary testing done, LDC needed to refine InstaMoney’s features to achieve the best version of the product and obtain the best performance of InstaMoney in terms of conversions and the lowest default rates.

Student spreadsheet to accompany product W25400.

Instructor spreadsheet to accompany product W25401.

At the very end of 2019, Jay Prakash Pal, divisional electrical engineer (Traction Distribution) for the Sealdah division of Eastern Railway in India, was asked to prepare a consolidated report for revising the contract demand with power distribution companies. Over the last six months, demand charge penalties had been imposed on multiple occasions for two power stations under his jurisdiction (Barasat traction sub-station and Sonarpur feeding post), as the monthly maximum demand had crossed the existing contract demand for these stations. He would have to provide a revised contract demand value to minimize the annual expenditure due to a demand charge penalty for the next year. While proposing the new contract demand, he would also have to ensure that the cost arising from the unutilized portion of the minimum guaranteed demand would be minimal.

Spreadsheet to accompany product W25028.

Instructor Spreadsheet to accompany product W25030.

Technology is advancing at a rapid rate, changing various aspects of our everyday lives. Businesses and governments are trying to adapt to this change by embracing positive aspects, while remaining attentive to negative aspects. This note focuses on technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data, considering the ethical issues that these technologies create within our society and also how these ethical issues are being addressed.

An actuarial intern at World Reinsurance Company was casually checking his e-mail and noticed that he had received a request from his manager to develop a quote for an upcoming request for proposal from one of World Reinsurance Company’s larger clients, Ontario Life. The request for proposal would have to contain a quote for an excess-of-loss policy to reinsure Ontario Life’s 10-year-term life insurance policy, consisting of 100 high-risk policyholders, for retention limits over CA$250,000 on a per-loss basis. The quote was to be submitted for review by the end of the day, so the intern had to get started on it immediately.