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In each chapter of this book, we use a database for a fictitious company, Performance Lawn Equipment
(PLE), within a case exercise for applying the tools and techniques introduced in the chapter. To put the
database in perspective, we first provide some background about the company, so that the applications
of business analytic tools will be more meaningful. PLE, headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, is a
privately owned designer and producer of traditional lawn mowers used by homeowners. In the past 10
years, PLE has added another key product, a medium-size diesel power lawn tractor with front and rear
power takeoffs, Class I three-point hitches, four-wheel drive, power steering, and full hydraulics. This
equipment is built primarily for a niche market consisting of large estates, including golf and country
clubs, resorts, private estates, city parks, large commercial complexes, lawn care service providers,
private homeowners with five or more acres, and government (federal, state, and local) parks, building
complexes, and military bases. PLE provides most of the products to dealerships, which, in turn, sell
directly to end users. PLE employs 1,660 people worldwide. About half the workforce is based in St.
Louis; the remainder is split among their manufacturing plants. In the United States, the focus of sales is
on the eastern seaboard, California, the Southeast, and the south central states, which have the greatest
concentration of customers. Outside the United States, PLE’s sales include a European market, a
growing South American market, and developing markets in the Pacific Rim and China. The market is
cyclical, but the different products and regions balance some of this, with just less than 30% of total
sales in the spring and summer (in the United States), about 25% in the fall, and about 20% in the
winter. Annual sales are approximately $180 million. Both end users and dealers have been established
as important customers for PLE. Collection and analysis of end-user data showed that satisfaction with
the products depends on high quality, easy attachment/dismount of implements, low maintenance,
price value, and service. For dealers, key requirements are high quality, parts and feature availability,
rapid restock, discounts, and timeliness of support. PLE has several key suppliers: Mitsitsiu, Inc., the sole
source of all diesel engines; LANTO Axles, Inc., which provides tractor axles; Schorst Fabrication, which
provides subassemblies; Cuberillo, Inc, supplier of transmissions; and Specialty Machining, Inc., a
supplier of precision machine parts. To help manage the company, PLE managers have developed a
“balanced scorecard” of measures. These data, which are summarized shortly, are stored in the form of
a Microsoft Excel workbook (Performance Lawn Equipment) accompanying this book. The database
contains various measures captured on a monthly or quarterly basis and used by various managers to
evaluate business performance. Data for each of the key measures are stored in a separate worksheet. A
summary of these worksheets is given next:
●Dealer Satisfaction, measured on a scale of 1–5 (1 = poor, 2 = less than average, 3 = average,
4 = above average, and 5 = excellent). Each year, dealers in each region are surveyed about
their overall satisfaction with PLE. The worksheet contains summary data from surveys for the
past 5 years.
●End-User Satisfaction, measured on the same scale as dealers. Each year, 100 users from each
region are surveyed. The worksheet contains summary data for the past 5 years.
●2014 Customer Survey, results from a survey for customer ratings of specific attributes of PLE
tractors: quality, ease of use, price, and service on the same 1–5 scale. This sheet contains 200
observations of customer ratings.
●Complaints, which shows the number of complaints registered by all customers each month in
each of PLE’s five regions (North America, South America, Europe, the Pacific, and China).
●Mower Unit Sales and Tractor Unit Sales, which provide sales by product by region on a monthly
basis. Unit sales for each region are aggregated to obtain world sales figures.
●Industry Mower Total Sales and Industry Tractor Total Sales, which list the number of units sold
by all producers by region.
●Unit Production Costs, which provides monthly accounting estimates of the variable cost per unit
for manufacturing tractors and mowers over the past 5 years.
●Operating and Interest Expenses, which provides monthly administrative, depreciation, and interest
expenses at the corporate level.
●On-Time Delivery, which provides the number of deliveries made each month from each of PLE’s
major suppliers, number on time, and the percent on time.
●Defects After Delivery, which shows the number of defects in supplier-provided material found in
all shipments received from suppliers.
●Time to Pay Suppliers, which provides measurements in days from the time the invoice is received until
payment is sent.
●Response Time, which gives samples of the times taken by PLE customer-service personnel to respond
to service calls by quarter over the past 2 years.
●Employee Satisfaction, which provides data for the past 4 years of internal surveys of employees to
determine their overall satisfaction with their jobs, using the same scale used for customers. Employees
are surveyed quarterly, and results are stratified by employee category: design and production,
managerial, and sales/administrative support. In addition to these business measures, the PLE database
contains worksheets with data from special studies:
●Engines, which lists 50 samples of the time required to produce a lawn-mower blade using a
new technology.
●Transmission Costs, which provides the results of 30 samples each for the current process used to
produce tractor transmissions and two proposed new processes.
●Blade Weight, which provides samples of mowerblade weights to evaluate the consistency of the
production process.
●Mower Test, which lists test results of mower functional performance after assembly for
30 samples of 100 units each.
●Employee Retention, data from a study of employee duration (length of hire) with PLE. The
40 subjects were identified by reviewing hires from 10 years prior and identifying those who
were involved in managerial positions (either hired into management or promoted into management) at
some time in this 10-year period.
●Shipping Cost, which gives the unit shipping cost for mowers and tractors from existing and proposed
plants for a supply-chain-design study.
●Fixed Cost, which lists the fixed cost to expand existing plants or build new facilities, also as part
of the supply-chain-design study.
●Purchasing Survey, which provides data obtained from a third-party survey of purchasing managers
of customers of Performance Lawn Care. Elizabeth Burke has recently joined the PLE management team
to oversee production operations. She has reviewed the types of data that the company collects and has
assigned you the responsibility to be her chief analyst in the coming weeks. To prepare for this task, you
have decided to review each worksheet and determine whether the data were gathered from internal
sources, external sources, or have been generated from special studies. Also, you need to know whether
the measures are categorical, ordinal, interval, or ratio. Prepare a report summarizing the characteristics
of the metrics used in each worksheet.
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. Dealer Satisfaction
c. Complaints
f. On-Time Delivery
g. Defects after Delivery
h. Response Time
Part 2: As noted in the case in Chapter 1, the supply chain worksheets provide cost data associated with
logistics between existing plants and customers as well as proposed new plants. Ms. Burke wants you to
extract the records associated with the unit shipping costs of proposed plant locations and compare the
costs of existing locations against those of the proposed locations using quartiles.
Part 3: Ms. Burke would also like a quantitative summary of the average responses for each of the
customer attributes in the worksheet 2014 Customer Survey for each market region as a crosstabulation (use PivotTables as appropriate), along with frequency distributions, histograms, and
quartiles of these data.