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Teaching Case: Using Excel to Make Strategic Managerial Decisions

1. CASE SUMMARY Success or failure in a retail business depends on managers making informed decisions on a timely basis. Managers rely on data from point of sale systems (POS) to help them understand their business and their customers. In this case, a cafe faces a number of significant management decisions. The managers running the cafe need help using the collected transactional data to make good decisions. Your role is that of an information systems consultant hired to transform the raw data from the point of sale system into a useable format. Additionally, you will create an analysis of the data to the managers for making several key managerial decisions. 2. INTRODUCTION FOR INSTRUCTORS The cafe has a dual mission: to serve food and drinks to students, faculty, and staff in the college of business, and to serve as a learning laboratory for students in the college of business as part of the senior capstone management class. Through running the cafe, students are able to actively learn by changing how the cafe operates and observing the effects of the change. To manage the cafe, the students organize into a series of teams, each dedicated to a function of the cafe: marketing, operations, accounting, human resources, new technology, and new products. Additionally, teams from other courses can also observe and experiment with the cafe. A sub-team of students acts as boundary spanners to coordinate work between other courses and the cafe operations. The cafe uses a point of sale system at the cash register (just introduced in January of 2015) to track its sales by item through the use of a bar code reader. Those data form the basis for the data used in this case. The database contains raw transaction data pulled from the point of sale system. Students incorporate the data into their operational decisionmaking using Excel spreadsheet software. The management team from the cafe has posed a number of questions that are awaiting analysis and consequent implementation of changes in future semesters. The section below has a brief description of the cafe and its operations, followed by the introduction of the relevant data and related operating and strategic issues currently facing the cafe team. 3. THE EXECUTIVE EXPRESS CAFE CASE FOR STUDENTS The Executive Express Cafe is a student-led cafe housed in a college of business. The cafe provides a venue for business students to operate and experiment with strategies and operational changes during their senior capstone class. The following sections will set the context by providing some background on the cafe along with its operations, menu, and introduction of the data. 3.1 Background & History A student team in the college of business founded the cafe in 2009 as part of a consulting project in their senior capstone strategy class. The cafe replaced a failed sandwich shop that was closed by the campus foodservice vendor after a relocation of a neighboring college led to a precipitous decline in sales. When the college of business relocated to a new facility in a restored federal courthouse in 2012, sales grew significantly due to a much improved facility as well as large increases in foot traffic in the building. Now, the cafe generates between $15,000 and $21,000 in sales per semester. Students make all relevant decisions in the cafe; a faculty member serves as cafe director and also the learning 'coach' of the capstone class. 3.2 Cafe Operations The cafe is open five days per week from 8am to 3pm. Students staff the retail operation of the cafe generally in teams of three for two shifts per week, each about three hours. The cafe buys food from local restaurants and other vendors. The students prepare and serve coffee as well as expresso-based drinks as do many well-known cafes. However, they do not prepare any food in the cafe itself. A guiding principle is that pricing should be student-friendly, with items priced under $3. …