Marketing and Quality Management

What a journey this has been! This amazing company, that we worked so hard to take to the top, is called Katpod.

Our blood, sweat, and tears we poured into this company by the bucketfuls. We fought hard for every Abraham Lincoln we could earn. In our eyes, we did the best we could and ended up taking this company a lot further than thought possible. We will now discuss what we decided and encountered along this path called owning a business.First of all, we will start off explaining our sales throughout these oh so quick eight quarters. In quarter 1 our sales raised up to a meager 36,000.

In quarter 2 we made no major changes and because of that we only increased our sales by 1,375, only to take a turn for the worst in quarter 3. In quarter 3, we ended up with less sales than in quarter 2. This more than likely was attributed to the Minicase decision to change the locks. This lead to a suspicion of drug usage, which, if it is true, would obviously lead to a drop in sales. In quarter 4 it shot up to 40,028, then to 43,l287 in quarter 5, and eventually to 47,940 in quarter 6.

The reason for this rapid rise in sales is because of 2 reasons.The first reason is because I am awesome at running a business, and the second reason is because we added a sales person to go from 3 to 4 as well as increasing pretty much everything: Market Research, Product Development, Quality Management, and Advertising and Promotion. The last 2 quarters just hovered around that same number. Quarter 7 was 44,820 and quarter 8 was 48,650.

So where we were when we bought this company from the losers who couldn't manage the business was right around 35,000 sales a quarter, we have now raised that number to around 47,000 sales a quarter, and where we want to go is increase sales to around 60,000 a quarter and lower the price of a unit a small amount.So, for the price per unit of our product, we charged them $39 every quarter. The losers who used to own the business charged $34 per unit, we raised that to $39 and did not change it. Eventually we want to increase our sales and lower the price to about $35 dollars.

Next, is lost sales. In quarter 1 we lost $1,375 because we underestimated the popularity of our product. We produced 32,000 units and sold out on our products. We did not make enough which result to our first lost sales.

Second and third quarter we did not have any lost sales because we learned from quarter one to produce more. In quarter 4 and 5 is when problems began to occur again in our sales. Quarter 4 had a lost sales of 3,137 and quarter 5 had 3,633. We produced a little too much during the time. The last three quarters we had no lost sales.

In quarter 6, our ending inventory was only 49 which is very good. This is also when we hit our highest stock price which was $62.88 which we then again ended with in quarter 8.Another part of our report is profits retained. In quarter one our profits retained was $96,000 then we increased by $15,000 in quarter 2.

We took an unfortunate turn in the 3rd quarter, dropping us down to $91,000. This correlates to our total sales third quarter at $36,240. The next three quarters, you can see an increase in our profits retained and total sales. Our profits in the fourth quarter was $101,000, the fifth quarter was $118,000 and in quarter 6 is where we reached our first highest which was $145,000. Quarter 7 is when we took a huge plummet which was a decrease of $45,000. Last quarter we made huge sales by increasing everything which turned out to be successful.

Our profits retained for quarter 8 ended at $145,000.As of quality management, advertising ; promotion, and product development, we made adjustments to each of these along the process of running our business. Out of these three, we focused and spent more money in developing our product. We invested $100,000 each quarter besides quarter 6 which is where we increased it by $25,000. Advertising and promotion is the second category we made sure to focus on. For the first three quarters we spent $60,000 and increased by $20,000 once we reached the fourth quarter.

The next three quarters we remained at $100,000 and $110,000 in quarter 8. Quality management quickly become an important aspect in our business. We started out investing $25,000 in the first two quarters. By the time we hit the fourth quarter we invested $100,000. By the time we got to the last quarter we had invested $120,000.

For plant capacity we have decided to mention our beginning, added, and available capacity. Our beginning plant capacity was 35,000 and steadily increased to 38,532 in quarter 4. We ended our plant capacity at 51,944. For added capacity, we started at 1,000 and increased to 5,000 in quarter 2. Our highest added plant capacity was at 7,000 in quarter 7. Our plant capacity in quarter 8 was zero.

Our capacity available during the first quarter was 36,000 and continued to steadily increase. We reached a high in the seventh quarter at 53,550.Next is the addition of our sales people. We decided to keep three sales people for our first three quarters.

Our total sales reflect the efficiency of each person we add. We added 1 more person at quarter 4 which totaled with 4 people during quarters 4-7. We ended with 5 sales people in quarter 8.In the first quarter our business started out at $6,000 for the Market Research department. We kept it consistent throughout the first three quarters. During this time our product was consistent, but we wanted to move up in the market.

In quarter 4 we bumped our Market Research up and began to spend 15,000 per quarter on the research. We liked the results and felt like our product was doing very well that we kept the Market Research at 15,000 dollars for the remainder of the year.Our business started with a pretty high cost of $19.35 but as the product began to to do well and sell more and more the production cost began to drop. Between quarter 3 and quarter 4 we saw our biggest drop in production cost. The cost dropped from $19 all the way down to $17.

74. Our product was doing really well at this point. The next quarter the cost was bumped back up to $18.10 where we stayed consistent until the last quarter where we saw the lowest cost per unit in quarter 8 at $17.

40. By this point we ran out of time and couldn't use the low cost.Stock price is the most important part of the business and the driving force of the company, this means we needed to keep the stock price up to compete in the market. Katpod saw a big jump right away in quarter 2 when the price jumped from $39.

21 all the way up to $47.28. This victory was short lived because in quarter 3 the price dropped back down close to the starting price at $37.28. From there we went on a roll our stock price began to rise consistently to our highest stock price at $62.

88. Once again this victory was short lived because in quarter 7 where the stock price plummeted down to $47.75. After a little deliberating our group decided to make a few changes and make a push to get to the top the the stock market. Finally in quarter 8 our price went back up the the quarter 6 price and we ended at $62.88 putting us in a strong third place for BizSim.

Now, to the only thing in business that people actually care about, cash inflow vs cash outflow. Obviously, what we strive to do is make cash inflow as high as possible and cash inflow as low as possible. The losers as we call them, but that means the people who used to own the business, did not do the best job of generating a lot of net income. Our goal was to spend a good amount of money, but also to use that to generate as much money as possible. In quarter 1, our inflow was 1,506 and our outflow was 1,238 which generated a 268,000 net income.

That generally stayed the same until we increased our quality management, advertising, as well as product development. After that it slowly rose up every quarter until quarter 7. In quarter 7 however, we wanted to catch those rotten girls next to us called Moon Tunes and we spend a lot of money on increasing our plant capacity and unfortunately caused our company to net exactly 0. Although that caused quarter 7 to be bad it helped out in quarter 8 because we didn't have to spend money on our capacity and brought that in as income instead.