As a business analyst, you work in a large personal care company Boween Pty Ltd. You are required to conduct a research and write a report to your departmentsupervisor. You report needs to include the following focus:

1. Give a brief introduction of the firm provided, including basic background information and issues to address.
2. How much sales do you expect to generate in the overseas market in the 2^nd quarter of 2020based on the least squares line? In your work, you need to include your excel calculation for covariance, correlation coefficient between selling expense and sales as well as a plotted scatter diagram. Briefly comment on the relationship between selling expense and sales.
3. The company wants to find out whether the consumer will consume more than 7bottles of liquid hand wash in the next quarter. Identify an appropriate statistical test and hypothesis, carrying out your analysis using a significance level of a =0.05.Show details of your work.
4. Provide a sales forecast report for 2^nd half of 2020 based on your analysis from the data provided and your revised estimate of the probabilities of each scenario that is based on the new market information.

Case Details

BoweenPty Ltd is a personal care company, and the key product is liquid hand wash product. The company sells its products both domestically and internationally. Due to the outbreak of the coronavirus globally, consumers tend to wash hands more often recently, which lead to a temporary shortage of the product in the market. Thus, the managementdecided to run the factory into full capacity in order to meet demand in both local and overseasmarket.

The sales manager has collected overseas sales data for the past 8 weeks, the total selling expensevs. the sales were recorded below. The manager expects the selling expense would be stable at around $23,000 each week in the 2^nd quarter and use this as the base assumption to estimate the sales for the foreign business.

The company wants to have a better understanding of how the consumption looks like in the next quarter in Australia, so they did the survey for a sample of 100 target households asking about how many bottles of liquid hand wash would a household consume in the next quarter. The survey data is attached in the excel. Given that the consumption for liquid hand wash is normally distributed with a standard deviation of 5.

Given the current situation is quite tough, the company also wants the sales department to forecast the sales for the second half of this year. Then the sales department did a scenario analysis as below:

Scenario 1: The outbreak will not get better until the end of the year, so they expect sales will increase by20% in the 2^nd half of this year vs. 1^sthalf of 2020.

Scenario 2: The market is not getting worse further, sales in the 2^nd half of this year will be similar to the 1^st half of 2020.

Scenario 3: The vaccine or medicine will be on the market soon and people will return to normal usage level, which is down by -25% in 2^nd half compared to the 1^st half of 2020.

After the discussion, management thinks the probability of scenario 1 is about 20%, probability of scenario 2 is 30% and probability of scenario 3 is 50%. 1^st half of 2020 sales are expected to be AU$20mn.

As a business analyst, however, based on your recent shop visits and the market news, you disagree with the probability of the above. On the back of your findings and analysis of the market, you adjust the probabilities of each scenario and make a new suggestion to the management team.

$ S Sales Revenue Selling expense $ 40,000 $ 10,000 $ 60,000 $ 12,000 $ 70,000 $ 13,000 $ $ 75,000 15,000 $ 85,000 $ 18,000 70,000 15,000 $ 100,000 $ 30,000 120,000 25,000 $ S $ S Sales Revenue Selling expense $ 40,000 $ 10,000 $ 60,000 $ 12,000 $ 70,000 $ 13,000 $ $ 75,000 15,000 $ 85,000 $ 18,000 70,000 15,000 $ 100,000 $ 30,000 120,000 25,000 $ S