Data Driven Decisions for Business CW4 Summative Assessment Brief | BPP

Assessment Brief

Assessment learning outcomes

This assessment is designed to gauge your understanding, skills and application of common data analysis techniques used in business and other organisations today. As such you need to demonstrate your attainment in these areas according to the four Module Learning Outcomes (LOs):

• LO1: Critically evaluate the evolving use of data in solving business problems, presenting logical arguments based on evidence
• LO2: Explore how data analytics can be used within a business context
• LO3: Critically appraise the presentation of data within a business environment
• LO4: Critically evaluate different business analytical techniques as part of planning a data analytics initiative.

Scenario

You have recently been employed by Crowe & Cooper International as a data analyst.

Crowe & Cooper International is a multi-national, fully online accounting firm offering accountancy services in the UK and over 50 subsidiaries in countries around the world. The firm’s core services help organisations with tax related decisions, accountancy and audit.

Crowe & Cooper International uses sophisticated data-encryption and communications technology to link clients to their services via an online platform. Source documents and data are uploaded to cloud storage where they can be accessed from any remote location. The firm typically bills for its services at a fixed monthly rate, benefiting its clients from a budget planning standpoint.

Since its foundation, Crowe & Cooper International established a partnership with SAGE to deliver its online services. Sage is the flexible and scalable financial platform that delivers deep accounting capabilities to thousands of businesses across the world. Sage allows Crowe & Cooper International to offer online accounting services such as general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, cash management, and order management, as well as built-in dashboards, real time reporting, time and expense management, project accounting, revenue management, and global consolidations for multiple entities.
Crowe & Cooper International has a structure of a limited liability partnership or LLP, which allows to have a flexible organisational structure to adapt to each country’s workforce profile. The possibility of having independent and yet coordinated organisational structure across countries allows the company to offer and deliver fully online services using the local workforce, enabling it to support a wide range of customers from local clients to multinational organisations.

As Crowe & Cooper International grows, it continues to increase its data analytic roles within the organisation to strengthen its strategic and operational decision-making capabilities. The recruitment strategy is to employ young professionals with strategic and data analytics skills willing to provide Crowe & Cooper International top management with strong evidence-based foundation for their business decisions. They like recruits to have broad management experience combined with strong academic background. Your MSc degree at BPP University was a key element in their decision to recruit you.

As part of your first assignment at Crowe & Cooper International, you have joined the Marketing department as data analyst. Your manager, the Marketing Director, requested you to complete a number of tasks to ensure that you have a grounded knowledge and understanding of data analytics and its application in decision-making. This is your opportunity to demonstrate your capability and give your employer the confidence to let you run your own project in the future.

The Marketing team is analysing different digital marketing strategies to provide a more balanced growth in the future, combining traditional online promotion with more advance social media tactics. In particular, the Marketing department has teamed up with other divisions such as Finance, Audit, Tax and Advisory, to explore how more modern digital marketing strategies can provide the basis for developing effective client engagement strategies. As in most strategy development processes, three steps are needed: first understand where the company stands now (where we are), second define strategic objectives (where we want to be) and third develop the approaches/initiatives/tactics to achieve these strategic objectives (what path we are going to take). So, you have been given the responsibility to analyse Crowe & Cooper International’s current business performance (where the company stands now).

Your job will be to analyse the performance of three of the best regions where Crowe & Cooper International operates: North America, Western Europe and the Middle East.

Crowe & Cooper International has experienced strong competition in these regions from other local online accounting firms. For instance in the UK competition comes from e-accounts, The Accountancy Partnership, Crunch and Gorilla Accounting. So, the performance of these three regions is a good indication of the current global market performance of the company.

Research objectives and tasks

The Financial Director is interested in identifying the best region to start implementing the new strategy. For this purpose, he wants you to: Perform an analysis of the revenue and number of projects of the three regions to identify the best region to start the new strategy.

As part of the analysis, the top management wants to consider the strengthening of the business by acquiring other companies, which are strong in the areas where the organisation is weak. The option being considered is to acquire a competitor which would give, in one hand, a competitive advantage to Crowe & Cooper International by reducing competition, increasing market share, and improving its market position. On the other hand, the acquisition would provide access to the competitor’s customer base and possible easy entry to new markets where the company has not yet any presence.

Therefore, the Financial Director also wants to understand the weakness of the company’s client portfolio, that is to identify those client sectors with low revenue and low project pipeline. Crowe & Cooper International’s client portfolio is composed by clients from the following industry sectors:

• IT and Telecom
• Manufacturing
• Healthcare
• Public and Government
• Finance
• Energy

In this respect, she wants you to:

Perform an analysis of the client sectors in the three regions to identify the lowest performing sector which might benefit from a competitor acquisition.

Since its foundation as an online business, Crowe & Cooper International has used digital platforms to promote its business such as corporate website and accountancy portals. However, since social media has become so dominant in the online world, the company feels it doesn’t exploit entirely the spectrum of opportunities this new and powerful digital channel offers. So, in January 2024 the company established an equity partnership with UK-based One-click Media Group, a social media marketing agency specialised in B2B social media for the European market. The idea of the partnership is to allow Crowe & Cooper International to quickly acquire for the Western Europe region marketing capabilities in the social media arena, such as brand positioning, content promotion, recruitment activity and direct lead generation.

The Marketing Director is keen to understand if the business model used in Western Europe with One-click Media Group could be applied to other regions, so that similar partnerships with regional social media marketing agencies can be established. So, she wants you to address the question:

Did the equity partnership with One-click Media Group, which brought social media know-how to the operations in Western Europe, increase the revenue and overall performance of the region?
The responses to the issues detailed above should be included in a summary MS Word report that you save and submitted.

Report Sections

Because this is your first project within Crowe & Cooper International, the management team has given you additional details regarding the structure and content that it is expected to see in your report. This is set out in Section 3 – Report Structure.

The set of data is available (see module dataset spreadsheet file). Since the data comes directly from the countries, quality issues are present which will require your attention!

You have four Sections to complete for your summative report.

Section 1 (LO4): Introduction and project plan

Summarise what you are going to present in the report. Then justify your plan for delivering the research project to the management of Crowe & Cooper International, making sure you also clearly refer to a data analytics implementation framework as part of your plan. Finally, explain how data analytics can add value and help to drive business performance improvements to Crowe & Cooper International.

Section 2 (LO2):

a)Data quality issues and remedies

Proceed with preparing the dataset for the analysis. Discuss initially the general issues encountered in collecting, reviewing and cleansing data and then detail the specific data quality issues you found in the project dataset and how these issues will be addressed.

b)Data analysis and commentary

Using only tables, set out and explain the results of your numeric data analysis and supporting commentary. Start by including a summary of exploratory data analysis of the dataset. Then create tables where you can analyse the overall performance of Crowe & Cooper International as well as its performance by region and by client sector. To answer the Section, you should perform your analysis using at least 3 tables (see guidelines for further details).

Section 3 (LO3): Data charting and commentary

Use your data charting and interpretation skills to develop graphical presentations of the data together with bullet-points setting out the key findings and inferences from the analysis. Create charts where you can compare and analyse project volume and revenue trends over time by region and by client sector, in particular where you can see evidence of any performance change due to the partnership with One-click Media Group in 2024 for the Western Europe region. To answer the Section, you should perform your analysis using at least 3 charts (see guidelines for further details).

Section 4 (LO1): Conclusions and recommendations

Based on your analysis and findings in Sections 3 and 4 set-out your conclusions and recommendations to Crowe & Cooper International’s top management. As part of your conclusions, include answers to the three project objectives raised by the top management.

Report Structure and References

In addition, marks are awarded for the overall professionalism of your report and the adoption of academic standards.

Section guidelines

The following section provides guidelines on the steps needed to perform each one of the Sections of this assignment.

Report structure and references guidelines:

• Your report should follow the section naming structure and order set out in the Brief. You should also add your own sub-headings as you see fit to demonstrate your ability to on-develop structure and content.
• Your report should include an auto-generated contents page including section headings and sub-headings. The contents page should also include a page-referenced list of all tables, charts and figures provided in your report. Remember to number all pages in your report, for example ‘Page 8 of 12’.
• Ensure you develop your discussion in a logical progression: Findings, inferences, conclusions, recommendations.
• Do not make general assertions without supporting evidence.
• Zero spelling errors and grammatical mistakes.
• Cite all your sources in the body of the text and in the Referencing using the Harvard Referencing style.
• Include a blend of industry research, case studies and academic references.

Report Structure

You should set out your report according to the following heading structure. You should add sub-headings under this overall structure as you feel fit to demonstrate your ability to on-develop the section themes and to provide meaningful sub-structure. But you must use this overall structure in order to provide a consistent framework against which your marker will allocate marks. You will be deducted marks if you do not follow this structure. Also note that there is no requirement for producing an Executive Summary.

University Cover Page

Table of contents

1. Introduction and project plan
2. Data quality issues and remedies
3. Data analysis and commentary
4. Data charting and commentary
5. Conclusions and recommendations
6. References
7. Appendix (optional)

In addition, you may wish to add further appendices as you see fit in order to support your work. Word count: 2,500. Cover Page, Table of Contents, References, Appendices, Tables, Charts and Figures do not count towards word count.

Marking Guide

The assignment is marked out of 100 and counts towards 100% of your module mark. The following table shows the Sections, marks and marking rubric. You should iteratively self-assess your performance against the Marking Guide as you develop your draft submission, in order to evaluate your performance against your target grade.