The purpose of this assignment is to apply your mastery of key enabling skills critical for business management. These skills include:
- Critical Thinking
- Writing
- Business Planning
- Controlling (Functions)
- Business Process Automation
- Data Analysis
- Problem Solving
- Supply Chain Management
- Workflow Management
Through this exercise, you will demonstrate your ability to integrate theoretical knowledge with practical application, which is essential for effective management and leadership in business environments.
Task
For this assignment, you will perform research to choose a publicly traded company. Specifically, a publicly traded company is needed for this assignment since you will need to review the company’s financial performance, and this information will be available to the public. A company’s annual financial statement, the 10-K report, is commonly available on the company’s website. You can also use the company’s stock ticker to review a summary of their financials from other websites, such as Yahoo Finance or Hoover’s (you must login to the UMGC Online Library). When reviewing the company’s financial performance, you should analyze the final year-end net sales, net income, and revenue for the past two years for trends (e.g., noting if performance increased or decreased).
In addition, please research the company sufficiently to understand the company’s mission, vision, goals, services, and customers. Please pay attention to the areas the company may need to control and where the company can benefit from improved efficiency. The company’s 10-K report is a good source of information about the company’s challenges; however, you should also perform additional research.
For this assignment, you are tasked with developing a 5- to 7-page written report using the sub-headings noted below. The 5- to 7-page requirement excludes the title and reference pages. Financial information can also be found on Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, MarketWatch, and MSN Money. The UMGC Library also has a Business Research Guide that can assist you in finding companies’ financial information.
- Introduction:
- Develop an introduction that gives an overview of the assignment’s purpose and what the reader can expect the assignment to cover.
- Company Background:
- Provide a brief background of the company, including its mission, vision, goals, key functional areas (i.e., sales, human resources, marketing, etc.) as shown in its organization chart, types of customers, and services.
- Performance Examination:
- How are the company’s strategic goals translated into measurable objectives for different departments and teams? What key performance indicators (KPIs) are used to track progress toward these objectives?
- Based on your assessment of the company’s performance, discuss the trends, strengths, and weaknesses. Recall that when reviewing the financial performance, you should analyze the company’s final year-end net sales, net income, and revenue for the past two years (e.g., noting if performance increased or decreased).
- Is the targeted performance for the area you are reviewing satisfactory or unsatisfactory? Please explain, including the performance area that is relevant to your performance examination.
- Controls:
- Considering your performance examination of the company, explain how the company can specifically benefit from implementing controls and where there is the potential for limitations in their ability to effectively monitor their performance. Please do not provide a generic discussion. Instead, your discussion should demonstrate your understanding of controls as applied within an actual business.
- Discuss your comparison of three different types of control (such as historical, concurrent, and predictive). Discuss which type of control is beneficial for the company and justify your choice.
- Standard and Measurement:
- Based on the type of control you chose in the “Control” section of this assignment, identify an applicable measurement that can be used to monitor the company’s performance. Please discuss.
- Control Techniques Comparison:
- Based on the “measurement” you chose in the previous section of this assignment; please discuss two control techniques you recommend implementing to track progress to your identified measurement.
- Monitoring Plan:
- Develop a monitoring plan to track progress against the measurement you recommended in the previous section of this assignment. The monitoring plan should include, at a minimum, the following information for each monitored activity:
- The monitoring activity
- Rationale for the monitoring activity
- Who will monitor
- Frequency of monitoring
- Associated risk(s)
- Develop a monitoring plan to track progress against the measurement you recommended in the previous section of this assignment. The monitoring plan should include, at a minimum, the following information for each monitored activity:
- Conclusion:
- Summarize key points iterated throughout the assignment. These should be the critical takeaways you want the reader to remember.
- Conclude by emphasizing the significance of the points; essentially, what does it all mean?
Submission
You must submit the following items in a 5- to 7-page paper:
- A detailed background of your selected company
- An analysis of the company’s current performance and the application of management controls
- A comparison of three control types and a rationale for selecting the most beneficial one
- A proposed control standard and measurement approach
- A comprehensive monitoring plan
Ensure that your assignment submission is supported by course materials and other scholarly resources, with all references cited both in text and in a list of full-text citation(s) for all sources used, placed at the end of the submission.
https://youtu.be/he5I6ByoaB4?si=gO2qvPncRuK7ar2S
https://youtu.be/SIZbT7gSFts?si=ogrpc51BE7EYXC9s
