Answer the four Executive Board questions
First American Bank and Trust Company was founded in 1927 in Atlanta, Georgia. Their corporate headquarters is still located in Atlanta, Georgia.
The bank currently has operations in 17 states east of the Mississippi River as follows: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Hew Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia.
The bank currently has a total of 1,275 branch offices in the above 17 states and the bank has a total of 14,300 employees.
All the bank locations are open from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Monday through Thursday, and from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM on Friday. In addition, 624 of the most profitable bank locations are also open from 9:00 AM until Noon on Saturday.
The bank has two major categories of customers as follows:
1. Individual Accounts: This includes people who have checking accounts, savings accounts, certificates of deposit, and auto loans and home loans with the bank.
2. Business Accounts: This includes partnerships, corporations, and non-profit businesses.
The bank does not plan to make any changes in the way that it services its individual accounts.
However, the bank is considering making a short-term change in the amount of money that it loans to its business customers. The reason is as follows.
The first six months of the year 2017 has been extremely profitable and the bank now has a significant amount of money at its disposal. In the past the bank has invested its earnings in making new loans to its business customers where there was a very good profit potential and where there was very little risk associated with the loan.
However, at this time the bank is considering investing a significant portion of its excess funds in expanding its own operations and only loaning a small amount of their money to their business customers.
The Executive Board of the bank would like to gather some preliminary information on the feasibility of all three of the following business proposals:
Proposal A: Add more branch offices in the 17 states where the bank already has operations but do not expand into any other states at this time.
Proposal B: Do not add any more branch offices in the 17 states where the bank is already established but instead expand into the following states east of the Mississippi River: Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Mississippi, and Ohio.
Proposal C: Do not add any more branch offices in the 17 states where the bank is already established but instead expand into the following states west of the Mississippi River: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
The Executive Board wants you to answer the following four questions and to provide them with all the following information:
1. What factors or criteria should be considered when evaluating the above three proposals?
2. Approximately how long will it take to acquire the information on each of the above criteria?
3. How should the factors or criteria be ranked in order to compare the feasibility of the above three proposals?
4. After the Executive Board makes a decision on which of the three proposals it will pursue, then what "major steps" would be necessary to implement each of the above three proposals and approximately how long would it take to implement each major step?
At this time the Executive Board does not want you to collect any data on the criteria that you recommend.
The Executive Board only wants you to identify what criteria needs to be collected, approximately how long it will take to collect the information, how the criteria should be weighted so the different proposals can be compared and evaluated, and approximately how long it will take to implement each of the above three proposals if a decision is made to pursue that proposal.