Assignment: Report Design

For each of the two reporting areas assigned to your group as follows,

Groups 1 & 2:

• How accurate are our quotes?
• How reliable are our promised completion dates?

Groups 3 & 4:

• How speedily do we complete jobs?
• How loyal are our customers?

Groups 5 & 6:

• How popular are our materials?
• How profitable are our jobs?

produce two mock reports with sample, bogus information in them. The first report should provide a summary, overview answer. The second report should provide a detailed answer, where the information is drilled down in terms of some variable hypothesized to be relevant and managerially meaningful.

Example: Suppose you had been assigned “How acceptable are our quotes?” as one of the two reporting areas.

• The overview report for this question would provide a SINGLE numeric answer to a quantitatively-formulated question, such as: Of all non-pending jobs, what percent have been accepted, and what percent have been rejected?
• The detailed/drilled down report for this question may break down rejected jobs by customer type to see whether certain customer types have a high rejection rate associated with them. Or alternatively, it may break down the rejected jobs by order-takers to see whether certain order-takers have a high rejection rate associated with the orders they process.

Make sure the variables you select for drill-down are meaningful and actionable in solving problems. For instance, if our quote inaccuracy rate happens to be too high, we need to break it down in terms of a variable that helps us understand where/why it is so high.Hence, for instance, breaking it down by job-id would not be quite helpful, as the reader would end up with thousands of report lines which fail to tell him why the inaccuracy rate is high.

For a sample of real-world drill down reports, read here.

In your reports, make proper use of sorting/ranking. Since all of these are performance reports, it makes sense to arrange the items in some order, such as from best to worst.

Also, make sure each detailed report has some positive (good news) and some negative (bad news) information in it. Highlight the good news in green, the bad news in red. Needless to say, you need a high quality color printer for this assignment to be able to show the colors.

Do NOT produce these reports in ACCESS or EXCEL. Doing so will unnecessarily preoccupy you with these software packages and their technicalities. To do this assignment best, you need to focus on the end-result and not worry about the HOW of actually producing each report; that comes later. Produce these reports in MS-Word. You are not creating real reports, but mock (real-looking) reports with fake (made-up) information in them. This will leave your imagination free to express your vision in an unfettered manner with rich/meaningful information, without getting bogged down in implementation difficulties.