The Task
This, in brief, is what you will do in this MAIN term project for this semester for this course.
1. Choose a business firm about whose operations you have a keen interest.
2. Creatively apply one or more of the tools or techniques learned in this course to suggest
and demonstrate how the operations of your chosen company can be improved. To
demonstrate how the operations can be improved, you will be making quantitative
analysis of the impact your idea will have on the company. Most generally, this will
involve the firms short-term or long-term profitability.
3. Write a report in about 4-6 pages in 11 font, single-spaced (plus up to approximately four pages of tables, graphs,
diagrams or other exhibits), explaining your idea and the expected impact in quantitative
terms.
Guidance on Choosing A Business Firm
It is very useful to choose a firm whose operations are close to your own strong interests
and passion, of which you are an expert. That way, you are likely to have thought about
the operations of such a firm already, and be able to come up with ideas with relatively
less effort. For example, if you are a runner, you might be interested in operations of
shoe manufacturers, or shoe stores, or water bottle manufacturing or distribution, etc.
As a general rule, it does not help to choose a very well known business firm, as there is
a lot written about such firms all over the internet. So, for you to think up something
creative to top all thats already out there and not plagiarize is going to be a lot tougher.
It is generally easier for you to be more creative with a firm on whom not a lot is already
written. [That does not mean that you may not — or even that you should not — choose
Tesla or Uber or Snap Inc. (Snapchat Inc.), but in that case you need to have an idea that
is really creative and novel. It can happen.]
If your idea seems novel and creative on the face of it but a curious person (e.g. me) can
do an internet search and find an idea very similar to yours, then the conclusion is that
you plagiarized. (Thats not my rule; thats the definition of plagiarism. Plagiarism is
defined not by intent but by the fact of presented work being unnaturally close to preexisting work.) A simple way to avoid accusations of plagiarism is to do a similar
thorough search yourself and avoid that possibility, before you run with an idea.
You can choose any business firm, big or small; a sole proprietorship, partnership, or
limited liability corporate entity. You could choose your parents restaurant, family pet
store, your sisters startup, your moms opthalmology practice, dads retirement business
selling woodcraft, the CMC Hub, Scripps Malott, your neighborhood Hot Yoga studio or
bagel shop, General Electric, MSNBC, Fox News or the U.S. Government. You could
even choose a part of the operations of the firm for example, your improvement idea
could have something to do with only tree-trimming service, which is only a part of your
girlfriends gardening and landscaping business. Of course, these are not suggested
examples: I am trying only to express the diversity of what you can choose.
Guidance on Specific Tools from this course you could use
What you are trying to do is to suggest what can be done to improve the operations of
your firm. This could be measured by the short-term or long-term improvement in
profitability. Whatever you do, there generally will need to be a quantitative or other
technical analysis, and not simple story-telling.
While anything you learned in this course would be acceptable tools or techniques, here
are some examples that are most likely to be useful for this project:
o Activity Based Costing and Activity Based Management
o Changing of production processes to change cost of a product
o CVP analysis & recommendations
o Analysis of special offers and recommendations
Analysis and recommendations of departments or product lines to start or shut
down
o Analysis and recommendations of products to further process (or not) into another
product
o Analysis of limited resources and recommendations based on working with
resources in short supply
o Analysis and recommendations on pricing and transfer pricing
o Capital Investments (as long as you use what we learn in this class and not just
what you learned in a finance class)
o Development of a balanced scorecard.
Note that a large majority of the tools and techniques described above are not already
covered in class at the time this assignment is released. (The list is actually roughly in
the order in which we cover the topics in class.) Mostly all of them will be covered by
the time of the second midterm, which occurs near about two weeks before the project
due date. Therefore, there is a chance that the tool or technique that really interests you
will not have been covered in class when youre starting on this project. I would
encourage you to use the syllabus and assigned readings to learn more about these tools
and techniques as you are searching for ideas for your project. I am happy to provide you
one-on-one tutorials on these topics before they have been covered in class to help you
develop more intense knowledge of these topics as you are planning your project.
You can certainly combine any of the above tools and techniques that you have learned in
this course with other tools you have learned elsewhere. These tools learned elsewhere
could for example include statistical, mathematical, or computing tools, or knowledge
derived from your finance, government, or science-related major areas of study. (Trivia:
One of my former History-major students wrote a thesis combining Accounting and
History to investigate whether Ferdinand Porsche after whom the Porsche automobile is
named was financially helped by the Nazis! So, surprise me! But also see the bullet
point below.)
While you are encouraged to incorporate your other strengths and skills with skills
learned in this course, the improvement you are suggesting must be to the operations of
the firm. Advantages to the firm through financing strategies (e.g. stock and bond
issuances, etc.) or marketing etc. will not be acceptable. Technological innovation is
acceptable, but only if near-future availability of that technology is a reasonable
expectation, it will affect operations, and its analysis by you involves skills developed in
this course.
An obvious question that can come up is whether you should concentrate on a small
number of tools or techniques from the course, or try to incorporate as many of the tools
and techniques as possible from the course. It is generally a more creative and interesting
project if you use a relatively smaller number of tools and use them deeply and
creatively, rather than throw a kitchen sink of tools at the problem. You certainly can
have an excellent study using only one tool but exploring it much more deeply than we
did in class by combining the idea with your other skills in statistics, math, economics,
science or computing, etc. The opposite kitchen sink extreme generally occurs when a
student hasnt really done enough deep thinking and is just checking boxes to fill up
space. That will generally result in a poor quality report. But there can be exceptions.
Guidance on where to find information
One major problem that you will face will be where to find information. Business firms,
especially large ones, dont give out managerial information, as most of it is confidential.
Disclosing it hurts the firms competitive advantage.
To some extent you can find the information you need through internet searches of
product availability and prices, etc. Some other information can be estimated by looking
at similar information for competitors. For example, if you cant find what battery Apple
uses in its iPhone 12 or its cost, you can try to find the capacity of the battery (in mAH)
and then try to find the wholesale market price of a cellphone battery of that capacity and
use that price as an estimate. Or, you can find out how much a battery costs for a similarlevel Android device, for which the information is a little less closely guarded.
In some cases, none of the above approaches will work. In such cases, you can make a
reasonable guess based on whatever information you do have. For example, lets say
you dont know how much labor cost a local not-so-fancy restaurant pays. In that case
you can make the assumption that waiters and waitresses are paid minimum wage, the
chef is paid maybe 2x minimum wage and the manager is paid 2.5x minimum wage. Of
course, chefs in fancy restaurants are paid a lot more, so you can gather some information
on how much more on average and make a suitable adjustment to the above
estimates.
In all cases, disclose clearly in the report where you found all your information. In the
case of assumptions and guesses, disclose the exact rationale used for each assumption.
Depending on the number and variety of such pieces of information and assumptions, you
could either present the disclosures as a chart or in footnotes, or even in the body of the
report. Generally, you dont want the flow of your report to be hurt by all these
disclosures, so in most cases youll be using footnotes or charts. That said, if it can be
stated very easily (e.g., with just a short phrase like this) then thats actually causes less
clutter than footnotes or charts. Use your judgment on what is best for the reader.
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