Group project for BUS 308 will create an opportunity for you to apply your knowledge and skills learned in the class to the real business problems and cases. Class project has 6 checkpoints as outlined below. IMPORTANT POINTS: • • • Submit your checkpoint file to the dedicated assignment on Canvas. Each file should be named as: BUS308_sectionX_ groupX_CPX (e.g. BUS308_section2_group5_ CP1.docx) At the beginning of your submission, list the names of the group members and report their contributions. Each member’s grade is affected by his/her contribution to each checkpoint of the group project. For example, if group member X is responsible for internet search and has contributed 100% for checkpoint #1, she/he will get all the 5 points. However, if the contribution is 90% (the member has not done his/her share of the checkpoint #1 completely), the member’s grade will be (0.9*5) =4.5. Each group collectively decide about the its members’ contribution. Group members should clearly communicate with each other and commit to their group responsibilities. Background Sale Process The sales process significantly influence the success of any business. “Even if all other aspects of management like planning, manufacturing, service delivery, communication, marketing, human resources, and finance, etc. are perfect and the sales process does not work, the company will not get the results needed. Hence, a sales process flowchart, detailing the sales process and its steps, tasks and decision making is needed to ensure an effective and efficient optimization of resources. The flowchart also helps to better manage the vendors and customers’ relations. It includes all the activities that sales team need to do in order to convert a prospect customer into an existing client. i.e., to identify the leads and follow up with them to become actual customers with deals closed. The tasks are: 1- Identifying the prospect clients (people, clients, who showed interest in the products/services that we sell (such prospect clients are called leads in the business context). 2- Examining the lead qualifications 3- Offer the leads some proposed products/services that solve their problems. 4- Admit and close the deal Task 1) lead identification So, to identify the leads, company “X LLC” is a training company that started courses and training bootcamps on blockchain and Bitcoin development. XLLC’s marketing team started a campaign to advertise those courses on their website, social media, email marketing, webinars, and direct mail. XLLC paid a consultant to help them build informative and entertaining content that builds a meaningful relationship with the web browsers and distribute their marketing contents into the right channels. The company also paid for a consulting search engine optimization team that will help for their website/web-content to become highly ranked so that potential customers find the company, understand its material, and then consider XLLC as a brand preference and ultimately into a lead. This investment generates potential students with interest in the courses. Therefore, customers filed their information into the page the XLLC’s website that has a form that gets their name, phone number, email, occupation, student interest, course expectations, and a short statement of purpose, it also has an acknowledgement checkbox that states “By submitting this form, I acknowledge that XLLC may contact me by email or phone.” Task 2) lead qualification Once the forms are collected Sales Representatives analyzes the qualification of the leads to follow up with qualifying leads who showed interest in learning more about the courses. Lead qualification is identified based on the following criteria: a) Does the prospect student have a need for the training (this is defined based on the lead’s background, occupation, and their statement of purpose? b) From the course expectations field answers, the sales team then evaluates the prospect student’s expectation and how close it is to what XLLC offers. Based on these evaluations, the sales team make a decision of whether they will continue through a personal follow up with the student to continue the sale process to attract the student to admit. Task 3, solution proposals and personal follow up: Prospects who qualify for personal follow up will be saved in a list. A sales member picks a prospect on first-in-first out bases. The sales member calls the prospect and go through a detailed description of the training and its outcomes. This call and discussion is again personalized for each prospect student according to her/his interests and answers in the forms. Task 4) admit and close deal If this call works through and the student was convinced of the value of the training, the sales member sets up a meeting with the student to go through the admission process for the bootcamp. Based on the process identified above (XLLc’s sales process) do the following checkpoints: Project checkpoints: 1. Project Checkpoint #1: submit business process analysis (using Visio): 1.1. describe the business processes. Rewrite how it is. 1.2. Use Visio to analyze the business process and gain insights. 1.3. Make (managerial) suggestions to improve the business processes. 2. Project Checkpoint #2: submit project databases (using SQL) 2.1. Identify 3 related entities that are central to the process. 2.2. Using SQL create tables storing data for the 3 entities. 2.3. Identify 3 critical business/managerial questions, given your database for 3 central entities. 2.4. Using SQL run queries (SELECT statements) to answer the questions. 2.4.1. For example, we need to know what students are taking which courses in the fall in order to assign them student advisors. 3. Project Checkpoint #3: submit project plan (using MS Project) 3.1. Using MS Project create a Gantt chart to show task dependencies and dates for your project. 3.2. Identify the critical path for your project. 3.3. Assign personnel to tasks and stipulate percentage of time that each person devotes to a task. 3.4. The task dependencies and time assignments to personnel should be realistic! You may be question on the presentation day or when you submit this checkpoint to explain and elaborate why certain task dependencies, for example, are created. 3.5. Finally answer the question of “how would the project become different/better if you have such a plan at the beginning?” 4. Project Checkpoint #4: Project presentation by the groups 4.1. Create a presentation in which you will cover the previous 3 checkpoints. Specifically, you should have slides for the following topics: 4.1.1. Business processes 4.1.2. Databases: design and query 4.1.3. Project plan for system development: Gantt chart. 4.1.4. Managerial recommendations 4.2. Make sure that you have a story for your presentation, that is, an interesting business/management problem is addressed using technology tools to analyze and improve processes, create and query databases, and plan project tasks and time. 4.3. Each group member should present. Collectively decide as a group who presents what.
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