Unit 5 ~ Quantitative Techniques for Business
Supermarket Sweep
Aim of Assignment
Use statistical techniques to collect and analyse data
The Scenario
How much do you know about supermarkets? For example, which is bigger, Safeway or Tesco. Perhaps Asda is bigger than either, and then there's Sainsbury of course. Could you put them in order of size? If so, how would you measure it? Net assets, perhaps, or revenue, or net profit.
This information might be interesting, but doesn't tell you much about the users of supermarkets, the customers. There are a number of questions you might want to answer about them, such as: do people on average spend more when they go to Tesco than when they go to Sainsbury? Do people travel further to grab the bargains at Asda? Are the people who shop at Safeway the higher earners? Is Tesco more 'single-friendly' than the other stores? Where does Somerfield fit in to this picture?
These are some of the vital questions of our time, and it's lucky that you are available to answer them, and this is the essence of this assignment.
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The First Task
Produce and implement a plan to find the following information for the major supermarket chains in the UK:
- Net assets
- Revenue
- Profitability
- Amount spent per customer
- Distance travelled per customer
- Comparative wealth of customers at different stores.
- Are customers usually alone, in couples, or in families or other groups?
The Second Task
Record and classify this information in a way that is logical and useful, and be sure to utilise available technology - and your skills. Use visual methods of presenting the important parts of this data.
The Third Task
Perform any necessary calculations with your data to enable analysis. You will certainly, for example, need to consider averages, dispersion, and standard deviation. What conclusions do you feel able to draw from your data after this process?
The Fourth Task
Write an exaplanation of why when we look at costing we need to be aware of how statistical techniques are used to collect costing information; how statistical techniques are used to describe and present cost data and how statistical measures to summarise cost data.
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The Suggested Methodology
You are invited to work in groups for Task One. It is stressed that Task Two and Task Three must be individual work.
The Outcome
You are required to produce a formal report with the following sections:
- Title
- Introduction (a brief outline of the background to your report)
- Methodology (your plan for Task One - this can be identical in the reports of fellow group members)
- Findings (the data in a range of narrative, tabular and graphical formats)
- Analysis and conclusions (calculations based on your data, and resulting conclusions)
- Acknowledgements
Assessment Criteria
- prepare and implement a plan for the collection of primary and
secondary information for a given business problem;
- classify and record data;
- solve problems involving the analysis and calculation of statistical quantities from frequency distributions.
Content
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Data Sources: primary and secondary' sources, survey' methodology, sample frame, sampling methods, sample error, questionnaire design
Interpretation of Charts: graphical and diagrammatic presentation
Frequency Distributions: generation from raw data, grouping. class boundaries, irregular intervals, histograms. frequency polygons
Representative Values: mean, median and mode, calculation from raw data and frequency distributions, appropriate uses
Cumulative Frequency: tables and charts, calculation and use of interquartile range (IQR) and percentiles
Measures of Dispersion: definition and use of range. IQR and standard deviation. use of spreadsheets
