Answer to Question #113984 in Management for Ally

Question

Let’s say you work in a metropolitan city for a large department store chain and your manager puts you in charge of a team to find out whether keeping the store open an hour longer each day would increase profits. What data might be available to your decision-making process? What data would be important to your decision?

Answer 1

The existing data of the chain store available for the decision-making process could be reviews of the past trends revolving around the following:

·        Data for sales

·        Historical information concerning the pricing of products

·        Data on sales that have been made on weekends and slightly late hours off working hours

·        Data on previous transactions periods

·        Data about external factors that may affect extended working hours.

Other important areas to consider in the decision-making process could involve adequate data that analyses attendance sampling, observation directions, and customers. It is also important to consider labor costs as well as sales per individual employee to determine the viability of hiring or adding wages to existing staff that will work in overtime.

Data on attendance that were sampled and reviews on the past changes and trends could be more important to enable you to assess and analyze the need to extend working hours. Tickets of all registered customers per hour and the total number of customers visiting the store each day gives more information on the hours that attendances are increased to prompt the need to extend working hours.