Tatum has recently been hired as the Contemporary Department manager for a large department store. On Monday, she attended her first department manager meeting conducted by the general store manager, Ms. Andrews. In attendance were the human resource manager, the operations manager, and five department managers. Ms. Andrews reported on the stores performance for the previous month. She discussed that the store had a healthy sales increase of 8% over the previous year. The operations manager, Robert then discussed each department's results individually. All departments with the exception of Shoes and Contemporary had increases of 5% to 15% over last year's sales. The Shoe Department had a decrease of 2% from last year, and the Contemporary Department had a decrease of 5% from last year's sales. The operations manager then explained that the store went over on payroll expenses, causing the store to miss its profit plan.

The human resource manager, Liz then spoke about the overage in payroll expense. Liz informed the managers that a small boutique in the city had recently gone out of business and that she had recruited four of the stores top employees. She believed they would be a great addition to the team because they were familiar with the store's vendors and had a strong client base that would follow them to the department store. These employees were not in the original payroll plan and did not contribute to the overage. In addition, several current employees were not meeting the companys selling performance standards. Liz informed the management team that in order to correct the overage in payroll the store had two options: (1) Reduce payroll by cutting part-time employee hours, or (2) Increase sales to offset payroll expenses. To keep employee morale positive, Liz suggested a major focus on increasing sales in the two under performing departments and addressing all performance issues in a formal manner as the best solutions. She asked all department managers to review the selling performance of the employees in their departments. Liz further stated that all selling employees must be productive store team members. If the salespeople are not meeting the productivity goals of their assigned department, a plan of action to increase performance must be developed.

Ms. Andrews then concluded the meeting by requesting that the underperforming departments meet with her next week to present a performance improvement strategy, which should include individual employee plans. As Tatum left the meeting, Robert, the operations manager, handed her a stack of computer-generated reports for the Contemporary Department.

Tatums first objective is to increase sales in the Contemporary Department by improving the productivity of the total department. To accomplish this she will need to analyze the productivity of each sales associate using sales-per-transaction and sales-per-employee-hour data. Tatum must then compare each associate's productivity to the department's total and goal. In order to calculate the average sale per transaction, she will need to divide the gross sales by the number of transactions. To determine the sales per employee hour she will need to divide net sales by the number of employee work hours. The sales-per-transaction goal for the department is $95.00, and the department's sales-per-employee-hour goal is $140. Use the numbers Tatum pulled from the reports to answer the following questions.

Monthly Productivity Reports
Contemporary Department
Store Number 782
	Gross	Customer	Net			$ Sales		$ Sales Per
Associate Name	Sales	Returns	Sales	Return %	# Trans.	Per trans.	Hours	Employee Hr.
Jane C.	10600	2100			130		100.00
Emily R.	25000	2000			291		152.00
Carrie S.	14000	5000			138		73.00
Melissa M.	9000	1600			112		120.00
Betsy J.	31000	5500			332		157.00
Deanna P.	32000	7200			361		150.00
Total Department	121600	23400			1364		752.00

Questions:

1. Calculate the following for each employee and the total department:

1. net sales
2. customer return percent
3. dollar sales per transaction
4. sales per employee hour

2. Is the Contemporary Department achieving the sales-per-employee-hour goal of $140? If not, what should Tatum include in her improvement strategy to achieve the department goal?

3. What should Tatum include in the individual employee plans to help her salespeople improve their sales-per-transaction goal?

4. How can Tatum achieve her overall goal of increasing the sales performance of the Contemporary Department?