Exercise 1 -

1. Several web sites provide information on many products. Review one of the web sites below and then answer the following questions.

Use www.cars.com or www.mysimon.comto review/assess a product of interest.

a. Identify the variables used to choose and analyze products on the site and which were most useful to you.

b. How thorough, valid, and valuable were the product and retailer reviews to you? Explain your response.

c. How is the web site functionally similar to a decision support system (DSS)? Justify your response.

2. Shopping websites seen in #1 above are databases. Identify whether the database you assessed is a relational, object-oriented or multi-dimensional database. Explain your reasons for your choice.

Exercise 2: Gaining Business Intelligence from Strategic Initiatives

The exercise is adapted from Project IV, page 337 of the textbook, "Business Driven Information Systems" by Paige Baltzan.
"You are a new employee in the customer service department at Premier One, a large office supply distributor. The company has been in business for three years and focuses on providing top of the line office supplies at a low cost. The company currently has 90 employees and operates in seven states.

Sales over the past three years have tripled. The manual systems currently in place are no longer sufficient to run the business. Your first task is to meet with your new team and create a PowerPoint presentation for the president and chief executive officer describing supply chain management, customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning. In 6-8 slides, the presentation should highlight the main benefits Premier One can receive from these enterprise systems along with any additional added business value that can be gained from the systems." Also, offer any cautions that management should consider. Research the Internet and find examples of enterprise systems for small businesses. Make a recommendation to management of a SCM, CRM and ERP enterprise system that might be used but that needs further research by your team.

Please provide strong contrast between your content and the background of the presentation. Add notes to the presentation in the notes section of the software to make sure the instructor understands the contents of the presentation. Also, add some graphics to make the presentation more interesting. Cite your sources in the last slide.

Exercise 3: Sales Support

You may use Excel to provide essential insurance sales information. The Excel Insurance Exercise (attached to this message) shows how information systems can provide practical and important information in the workplace. This is a particularly useful exercise for anyone who has a sales job, is an account manager or wants to start a small business.

Exercise taken from "Management Information Systems, 10th edition" by James A. O'Brien and George M Marakas, 2011, page 344.

Christina Lovan works as an independent agent for Farmer's Insurance (www.farmers.com) in O'Fallon, Illinois. As an independent agent, she manages her own office and earns her income entirely from policy sales. Farmers Insurance supports Christina's efforts with training and access to a web-based suite of applications that help her manage her business. This extranet includes contact, customer and policy management systems, as well as corporate communications. The system also includes a feedback feature agents may use to report software problems or make suggestions regarding future software enhancements.

Christina enjoys working with people to help them solve their problems. However, to meet these people, Christina needs leads. She purchases leads from Farmers Insurance. Net Quote (www.netquote.com), InsureMe (www.insureme.com), AllQuotes (www.allquotesinsurance.com), and Crisscross (www.criscross.org), a database of local residents and businesses. She asks each client for three referrals at each meeting. She is a member of Business Networking International (www.bni.com), and she is an active member of the local chamber of commerce.

Although the software tools provided by Farmers Insurance allow Christina to track prospective customers, they do not measure information quality. Led information is expensive to purchase or solicit. Christina needs to know the best way to spend her time and money. Until Farmers provides a system update to accommodate this need, Christina has developed her own data quality evaluation tools using Microsoft Excel.

With a few basic Excel skills, we can duplicate Christina's efforts. Download and save "Insurance.xls" from this web assignment and use it to complete the following exercises. Note that the data providers used in this exercise are real, but the data in this spreadsheet are randomly generated. There are three spreadsheet tabs for this exercise: Cover Sheet, Sale Leads and Pivot Table Extra Credit. If you do not see the tabs at the lower left hand corner of Excel, click on View on the ribbon and then click on Full Screen.

a. Pending sales need Christina's immediate attention. Help her spot these opportunities by automatically highlighting them. Select the "Sale Leads" spreadsheet and use Excel's Conditional Formatting feature to set the cell shading color of each Status cell (Life, Auto, Home, Health) to green if the status is "Sale" (S) and read if the status is "Pending" (P).

b. Select the "Cover Sheet" spreadsheet. In cell C2, use the COUNTA function to count the total number of sales leads in the Sales Leads sheet. (Note: this calculation needs to be correct for the final answer to be correct.) In cells C5 through C8, use the COUNTIF function to count the number of sales made for each type of insurance. In cells D5 through D8, divide the sales made by the number of leads to calculate the percentage of sales. Write these formulas so they calculate the correct answers even when Christina later adds more records to the list. Which product has the highest sales rate?

c. When rating the quality of her information, Christina counts whether or not a lead resulted in at least one sale. Using the IF and the OR functions write a formula that will display "1" when at least one sale was made to a lead and "0" if the lead generated no sales.

d. Extra Credit (4 points): Ultimately, Christina needs to know which lead source results in the most sales. Create a pivot table to average the data in the "Sales" for each "Source." Format this result as a percentage. Because a 1 indicates at least one sale and a 0 indicates no sales, the average per source indicates each source's closing rate. Which source had the highest closing rate? Which source had the lowest closing rate?