Abstract: This case involves actual data from a student managed café that serves as a learning laboratory for a college of business. The student team that manages the café has never had access to precise data from a point of sale system until this semester. However, once they downloaded the raw data from the cash register they were unable to make sense of the data. This was in part due to the data entry errors in recording transactions as well as operational issues such as multiple managers entering new items into the register when there is already an existing code for the item in the Point of Sale (POS) database. To clean up the data and develop actionable spreadsheet based results, the managers decide to call in a team of information systems consultants to help them clean the dataset while not losing important data. To address the operating concerns of the managers, the consultants analyze the sales data for a number of questions whose answers can be used to improve how the café operates. By using Excel to analyze the data, consultants will be able to address the managerial decisions faced by the café team.

Keywords: Spreadsheets, Excel, Data cleansing, Descriptive statistics

Download this article: JISE - Volume 27 Number 2, Page 93.pdf

Recommended Citation: Jacobs, A., Robinson, D. F., & DePaolo, C. A. (2016). Teaching Case: Using Excel to Make Strategic Managerial Decisions. Journal of Information Systems Education, 27(2), 93-98.