-due on Thursday at 3 pm

You are a business analyst at Egger Consulting. You have been given this case description from a potential client:

Happy Hat, a U.S. national chain of frozen yogurt stores with about 500 stores in 40 states is asking for assistance with its business processes. The average number of visitors per store has held constant over the past several years, but revenues per store are down by an average of 10%, and many stores are no longer profitable. The client suspects that a large amount of inventory is being thrown away unused at the end of each day. At the same time, customer polling suggests that the yogurt flavor customers want is often not available, even when the flavor is posted on the menu. People also complain about stores being closed when they visit. Now, the chain is facing increased competition from frozen yogurt sold in 24-hour grocery stores. Happy Hat has asked your team to recommend business process changes that can help them increase revenues and restore profitability.

Happy Hat currently has the following data available:

a. 4 years of cash register data for every store that has, for each transaction, the date and time of the purchase, the specific items purchased, and the sales price of each item purchased.

b. 4 years of delivery data that lists how much of each kind of yogurt mix, flavoring, and topping was delivered to each store each week.

c. Typical public company accounting data, including annual revenues, annual cost of goods sold, in-store inventory on hand at the end of the year.

No other company data is available.

Bring to class a description of:

– One of the problems faced by the business

– A business process change that can be useful in addressing that problem

– One metric that can be measured before and after the change to determine if it worked

– The data elements you’d use to calculate your metric

The problem and metric you choose can be related to revenue, profitability, risk, operations—anything you think the company needs to pay more attention to.