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Instructor Spreadsheet to accompany product 8B21E012.

Student Spreadsheet to accompany product 9B21E012.

Jay Bharat Spices Pvt. Ltd., a company located in Cuttack, India, was involved in the manufacturing and distribution of spices across India under the brand name Bharat Masala. The company specialized in producing basic spices such as turmeric powder, cumin powder, and chili powder. The senior management team had recently noticed a rise in demand for the spice garam masala in the East India market and asked the company’s vice-president of East India operations to oversee the launch of this new product over the next six months. The vice-president was now struggling with multiple constraints related to the launch, including storage capacity in the warehouse and various financial constraints that were forcing him to look for a more economical and efficient solution.

Student Spreadsheet to accompany product W25298.

Instructor Spreadsheet to accompany product W25299.

In early 2021, an investor wanted to invest in Bitcoin. However, because of the high volatility of the currency, she wanted to know when to buy and sell Bitcoin to avoid the price fluctuations caused by various short-term phenomena. Her main objective was to generate the maximum profit possible based on the moving average strategy. How could she use this strategy to profit from Bitcoin’s price movement?

Spreadsheet for product 8B21E011.

Spreadsheet to accompany product 9B21E009.

As a result of recent success and rapid growth, the Skyrose Marketing Agency team was becoming overwhelmed with significant variation in workload levels. The vice-president, who was responsible for managing the company’s clients from the beverage industry, wanted to smooth the team’s workload level to improve morale. She also wanted to remain attentive to her clients’ needs, which could increase as peak holiday seasons approached. The vice-president was considering using Google Trends to predict how popular certain beverage products would be in the future so that her beverage company clients could predict future sales volumes. She hoped that by forecasting proxy sales for three specific clients she could gain key insight to help her smooth the volume levels of her team’s workload, without having a negative impact on her client relationships.

In November 2018, a bicycle program specialist who worked in the Planning and Sustainability Division at the Washington, DC, District Department of Transportation, wanted to analyze Capital Bikeshare’s bike rental demand for the past two years. Capital Bikeshare was a station-based bike-sharing operator that provided an expansive, multi-jurisdictional transportation system to Washington and the surrounding area. If the bicycle program specialist could determine some significant factors that affected users’ ridership patterns, he could best design his expansion plan of adding 40 new bike-rental stations to the system. He obtained the hourly bike rental demand for October 2016–September 2018 to evaluate how sensitive the demand was to some external factors.

Spreadsheet to accompany product 9B21E008.

Spreadsheet to accompany product 8B21E003.

Presentation to accompany product 8B21E003.

In 2017, the general manager of Rajarambapu Patil Co-operative Sugar Factory, a 50-year-old sugar plant in India, needed to recommend a strategy for the factory’s upcoming production cycle. For the aggregate production plan, he was considering three options: a chase strategy, a level strategy, and a subcontracting strategy. The company faced multiple challenges, including a limited pool of skilled labourers, employee poaching by competitors and allied manufacturers, the wide availability of job options in metro cities, and pressure from the labour union. Company management wanted to optimize profits, while reducing risks and incurring no extra costs. How should the general manager decide which strategy would best meet all the criteria?

In 2016, a summer intern at Bombay Hospital Indore, in India, was tasked with evaluating the hospital’s patient discharge process. Two types of insured patients required different discharge processes for the payment of outstanding balances. The intern needed to map the respective processes and project the outcomes of (1) moving from the current two parallel systems to one centralized, or pooled, system; and (2) adding a third staff member to process patient discharges and collect payments. Would these suggested solutions resolve the problem of wait times? Would one be more effective than the other?

In 2014, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited (BPCL), a large, government-owned, global, Fortune 500 petroleum refining and marketing company in India, was facing a variety of issues around its audit process. The internal audit department had been facing delays in completion of audits and compliance of recommendations. The executive director and head of the Internal Audit (IA) department believed that performance problems were due to the organization of the department. Changes were needed to the processes, technology, and structure of the department, and he wanted his team to find solutions to put some fundamental changes in place. What changes should be made to IA’s processes, staffing, and structure so the company could complete more audits and comply with the recommendations?

Additional Supplement to accompany product 8B20E019.

Spreadsheet to accompany product 9B19E013.

An investment manager at Glitz Investments, a firm based in the United States with a focus on the entertainment industry, wanted to identify potential blockbuster movies in the Indian film industry for the firm’s potential investment purposes. The investment manager received a report compiled by analysts at the firm indicating that Bollywood would be an attractive industry for investment. The firm’s analysts had collected data but could the manager determine a quantitative relationship between box office performance and the factors the team had identified? Could Glitz Investments choose movies based on this analysis alone? The investment manager's boss was looking for more specific data on which to base the firm’s investment decisions.

In April 2020, amid the global pandemic resulting from the spread of Covid-19, the president of the Broadway League, which represented theatre owners, producers, presenters, and general managers for Broadway and across North America, faced a challenge. On March 12, 2020, Broadway had suspended all plays and musicals. The president and her team needed to determine when Broadway might be able to reopen, what the Broadway League should be communicating to producers and guests, and what the reopening of Broadway would look like amid the global coronavirus pandemic. However, to reach these decisions, she first needed to determine the reliability of the recently released New York State antibody study and estimate the true prevalence of antibodies in the population.