Sally’s Soaps
Sally, your boss at ‘Sally’s Soaps’, just walked into your office. She is a little upset as she hands
you a print out of an email she just received. You take it and read:
Sally,
I really don’t understand what has been happening with my shipments, they never
arrive on time! I am losing sales and upsetting customers with stockouts. I have
been a retailer of Sally’s Soaps since you were mixing soaps out of your kitchen.
We used to get such great customer service when it was just you and your family.
It really seems that you have gone corporate and no longer care for the small
retailers that helped you become successful. If my shipments don’t start arriving
on time I am going to have to find another supplier.
When you hand it back to her she says:
“I like making soap, not shipping boxes. I hired you so I would not have to tape
up another box. What is happening here? Let me know what is going on by the
end of the day so I can call this client and repair this damage”.
As Sally walks out your door, you reach for your computer and pull up some shipping data for
the last month.
Questions to answer:
1- What customers order the most from Sally?
(We work through this in the spreadsheet)
2- What products are having shipping delays?
(You work through this in the spreadsheet)
3- Which shipping method is most likely used on late shipments?
4- Which customers should Sally personally follow up with? Why?
Helpful Notes:
If need to know the number of days between two dates, that is very easy to do in Excel. Just
subtract one date from the other. Excel may automatically format the cell with the formula in it
as a date, which means instead of seeing a number (29), you’ll see a date (1/29/1900). But all
you have to do is set the formatting for that cell to General or to any number format.
If you want to know the number of months or years between two dates, the best way is to use the
DATEDIF() function. However, you won’t find this one in the function wizard so you will have
to remember how to type it in yourself. The format for the function is DATEDIF(start date,
end date,”unit”). Unit meaning the unit of measure, can be “D” for days, “M” for months, or
“Y” for years.
I have gone ahead and created the DATEDIF column for you.
https://mediaspace.kennesaw.edu/media/Sally+Soaps/1_d796itvx
