Data Driven Decisions for Business CW5 Summative Assessment Brief | BPP

1. General Assessment Guidance

• Your summative assessment for this module is made up of this 2,500 word submission which  accounts for 100% of the marks. 
• Please note late submissions will not be marked.
• You are required to submit all elements of your assessment via Turnitin online access. Only submissions made via the specified mode will be accepted and hard copies or any other digital form of submissions (like via email or pen drive etc.) will not be accepted.
• For coursework, the submission word limit is 2,500 words. You must comply with the word count guidelines. You may submit LESS than 2,500 words but not more. Word Count guidelines can be  found on your programme home page and the coursework submission page.
• Do not put your name or contact details anywhere on your submission. You should only putyour student registration number (SRN) which will ensure your submission is recognised in the  marking process.
• A total of 100 marks are available for this module assessment, and you are required to achieve 
  minimum 50% to pass this module.
• You are required to use only Harvard Referencing System in your submission. Any content which  is already published by other author(s) and is not referenced will be considered as a case of  plagiarism.
• You can find further information on Harvard Referencing in the online library on the Hub. You can  use the following link to access this information: BPP Online Library: Business Guide
  
• BPP University has a strict policy regarding authenticity of assessments. In proven instances of  plagiarism or collusion, severe punishment will be imposed on offenders. You are advised to  read the rules and regulations regarding plagiarism and collusion in the GARs and UPPs which  are available on the HUB in the Help and Support section under Documents and Forms.
• Use of AI in assessments is only allowed for the purposes of reviewing a draft, correcting language errors or if specified in the summative assessment brief. If you have used AI for any of these purposes, you should indicate this on the Assignment Cover sheet. For more information  regarding acceptable and unacceptable use of AI, please enrol onto the Generative AI  Foundations course on the HUB.
  • You should include a completed copy of the Assignment Cover sheet. Any submission without this completed Assignment Cover sheet may be considered invalid and not marked.

2. Assessment Brief

2.1. Assessment learning outcomes

This assessment is designed to gauge your understanding, skills and application of common data analysis techniques used in business and other organisations today. As such you need to demonstrate your attainment in these areas according to the four Module Learning Outcomes (LOs):

• LO1: Critically evaluate the evolving use of data in solving business problems, presenting logical arguments based on evidence
• LO2: Explore how data analytics can be used within a business context
• LO3: Critically appraise the presentation of data within a business environment
• LO4: Critically evaluate different business analytical techniques as part of planning a data  analytics initiative.

2.2. Scenario

You have recently been employed by Greetings Health Ltd. to join the Accounting & Finance 

Department as a financial data analyst. 

Headquartered in London, Greetings Health Ltd. is a multi-national healthcare insurance company. The company aims to offer a full range of health insurance, enabling affordable coverage and simplifying the health care experience.

Greetings Health Ltd. completed in January 2024 an already announced acquisition of Insur4me.com. The company is a direct competitor of Greetings Health Ltd. Insur4me.com is Europe’s sixth largest healthcare insurance company by revenue, with more than 15 million customers across different countries. Under the terms of the deal, Greetings Health Ltd. paid Insur4me.com’s shareholders approximately 3 million shares of Greetings Health Ltd. stock valued at $600 million at time the deal was announced and $600 million in cash. 

With this acquisition, Greetings Health Ltd.’s top management is looking to achieve synergies to help  the company to expand/consolidate into current markets, reduce overhead costs, boost profits and  grow its overall businesses. All of these benefits are essential for Greetings Health Ltd. to remain  competitive in today’s rapidly changing healthcare landscape. 

While the vision of the acquisition is clear, the way in which the management seeks to implement it  makes the critical difference between realising the value of the acquisition or not.

The Finance Department is regarded as a trusted independent analytics adviser across the entire  company, and it plays a fundamental role in defining the approach to the post-acquisition  integration and to ensuring that value from the synergies is achieved across the organisation. The  Head of Finance’s role on identifying, qualifying, executing and tracking these synergies, will create  consensus and accountability across the organisation. By ensuring the organisation seeks to achieve  these synergies, the Head of Finance will create a blueprint for action that summarises where the value of the transaction lies, where and when it will be realised, and the key assumptions that  underpin it.

As result of this acquisition, Greetings Health Ltd. decided to increase its data analytic roles to  strengthen its strategic and operational decision-making capabilities. The recruitment strategy is to  employ young professionals with strategic and data analytics skills willing to provide Greetings  Health Ltd. top management with strong evidence-based foundation for their post-acquisition  business decisions. They like recruits to have a broad management experience combined with strong  academic background. Your MSc degree at BPP University was a key element in their decision to  recruit you.

As part of your first assignment at Greetings Health Ltd. you have joined the Merge & Acquisition  (M&A) group as financial data analyst. Your manager, the M&A Manager, has requested you to complete a number of tasks to ensure that you have a grounded knowledge and understanding of data analytics and its application in decision-making. This is your opportunity to demonstrate your capability and give your employer the confidence to let you run your own project in the future. The top management is looking at the union of the two companies as a combination of different businesses units, with each unit distinct from each other through its unique product-market economics. This business portfolio view of the two companies results in a strategy for the individual business unit based on its relative competitive position as well as growth rate for each product and market combination. Understanding products and market is critical, since the competitiveness of a product will determine the rate at which it will generate revenues, while the market growth rate will influence how readily market share can be gained and the relative amount of value to be generated with additional resource allocation. 

By applying business portfolio frameworks such as Ansoff’s matrix, the top management is looking at  four different strategies to manage the portfolio of business:

• Market penetration strategy – The idea is to increase Greetings Health Ltd.’s market share in 
  a particular country via merge/consolidation of both companies’ products under Greetings Health Ltd. brand. This can be done by keeping the strongest Greetings Health Ltd.’ products with a strong national presence and absorb Insur4me.com products.
• Product extension strategy – The concept is to keep the products of each company under Greetings Health Ltd. and Insur4me.com current brands. Makes immense sense as top management doesn’t have to cannibalise either of the products.
• Market development strategy – The option is to use Insur4me.com’s strong presence to strengthening Greetings Health Ltd. position in markets where its sales are weak via consolidation of both companies’ products under Insur2me.com brand. The acquisition gives Greetings Health Ltd. access not only to a new customer base but also a strong distribution network through which one owns product could also be sold.
• Divestment strategy – This option entitles the selling off some or all Insur4me.com’s underperforming products in a particular country. This option could even consider the entire exit  of a country if both companies are under-performing. Insur4me.com has business in many countries, so Greetings Health Ltd.’s top management considered too risky to start the consolidation process everywhere. They decided to start analysing the integration option to only a small group of countries.Your job will be to analyse Insur4me.com performance in its three best performing countries: India, Mexico and the UK. Insur4me.com has experienced strong competition in these countries from other healthcare such as UnitedHealth Group and Bristol Myers Squibb. So, the results of the post-acquisition process in these three countries are a good indication of the future strategic benefits the acquisition will generate to Greetings Health Ltd.’s shareholders.

2.3. Project objectives

As part of the project, you have been approached by the top management with specific objectives related to three decisions they have to make. 

The M&A Manager is interested in identifying the best country to start implementing a MarketDevelopment strategy. For this purpose, he wants you to:

Perform an analysis of the revenue and volume of customers of the three countries to  identify which country has the best performance, which could be the best candidate to  merge/consolidate all services under Insur4me.com brand.

As part of the analysis, the M&A Manager also wants to understand the performance of  Insur4me.com’s services, so that weak and strong services could be the candidates for a  Divestment or Market Penetration strategies respectively. Insur4me.com current offer is made of the following Health insurance services categories:

• Basic Health Insurance
  inpatient treatments covering the costs of hospital stays and surgical procedures.
• Comprehensive Health Insurance
  inpatient and outpatient treatments covering the costs of hospital stays, surgical procedures,specialist consultations, and diagnostic tests.
• Critical Illness Insurance
  lump sum payment if the person is diagnosed with a specified serious illness, such as cancer, heart attack, or stroke.
• Dental Insurance
  cover the costs of routine dental check-ups, cleanings, and treatments such as fillings, crowns, and bridges.
• Vision Insurance
  cover the costs of routine eye exams, prescription glasses, and contact lenses. Some plans may also provide coverage for laser eye surgery or other vision correction procedures.
• Travel Health Insurance
  cover for medical emergencies and other health-related issues that may arise while the person is traveling or living abroad.

In this respect, he wants you to:

Perform an analysis of the insurance services categories offered by Insur4me.com in the three countries to identify:

• the lowest performing service which might be considered for divesting (selling off),  and
• the highest performing service which might be used to strengthening Greetings 
  Health Ltd. position. 

At the end of 2023, before the acquisition was even proposed, Insur4me.com started a re-branding exercise. The rebranding project was a marketing strategy initiated by the Marketing department that involved changing the company's image, identity, and positioning in the market. It included updating the company's logo, website, social media, marketing materials, and messaging to better align with its, at that time, goals and target audience. The public launch of the new re-branded image occured in January 2024.

Greetings Health Ltd.’s Marketing Director is now keen to understand if Insur4me.com’s re-branding  could be also done for Greetings Health Ltd., so that the brand could better be aligned to the new  strategy of the two companies together. So, she wants you to address the objective: 

Did the re-branding done in 2024 by Insur4me.com have a positive impact on the revenue and overall performance of the company?

The responses to these three objectives should be included in summative report that you save and  submit as a PDF format file.

Struggling with your DDDB CW5 Summative Assignment

Request to Buy Answer

2.4. Report Sections

Because this is your first project within Greetings Health Ltd., the management team has given you  additional details regarding the structure and content that it is expected to see in your report. This  is set out in Section 3 – Report Structure. 

The set of data of Insur4me.com is available (see module dataset spreadsheet file). Since the data  comes directly from the countries, quality issues are present which will require your attention! You have four Sections to complete for your summative report.

Section 1 (LO4): Introduction and project plan

Summarise what you are going to present in the report. Then justify your plan for delivering the  research project to the management of Greetings Health Ltd., making sure you also clearly refer to a  data analytics implementation framework as part of your plan. Finally, explain how data analytics  can add value and help to drive business performance improvements to Greetings Health Ltd.

Section 2 (LO2):

a) Data quality issues and remedies
Proceed with preparing the dataset for the analysis. Discuss initially the general issues encountered in collecting, reviewing and cleansing data and then detail the specific data quality issues you found in the project dataset and how these issues will be addressed.
 
b) Data analysis and commentary
Using only tables, set out and explain the results of your numeric data analysis and  supporting commentary. Start by including a summary of exploratory data analysis of the dataset. Then create tables where you can analyse the overall performance of Insur4me.com, as well as its performance by country and by insurance service category. To answer the Section, you should perform your analysis using at least 3 tables (see guidelines for further details).

Section 3 (LO3): Data charting and commentary

Use your data charting and interpretation skills to develop graphical presentations of the data  together with bullet-points setting out the key findings and inferences from the analysis. Create  charts where you can compare and analyse customer volume and revenue trends over time by country and by insurance service category, in particular where you can see evidence of any performance change due to Insur4me.com’s re-branding. To answer the Section, you should perform your analysis using at least 3 charts (see guidelines for further details).

Section 4 (LO1): Conclusions and recommendations

Based on your analysis and findings in Sections 3 and 4 set-out your conclusions and recommendations to Greetings Health Ltd.’s top management. As part of your conclusions, include answers to the three project objectives raised by the top management.

Report Structure and References

In addition, marks are awarded for the overall professionalism of your report and the adoption of 
academic standards.

2.5. Section guidelines

The following section provides guidelines on the steps needed to perform each one of the Sections  of this assignment.

Report structure and references guidelines: 

• Your report should follow the section naming structure and order set out in the Brief. You should also add your own sub-headings as you see fit to demonstrate your ability to ondevelop structure and content.
• Your report should include an auto-generated contents page including section headings and sub-headings. The contents page should also include a page-referenced list of all tables, charts and figures provided in your report. Remember to number all pages in your report, for example ‘Page 8 of 12’.
• Ensure you develop your discussion in a logical progression: Findings, inferences, conclusions, recommendations.
• Do not make general assertions without supporting evidence.
• Zero spelling errors and grammatical mistakes.
• Cite all your sources in the body of the text and in the Referencing using the Harvard Referencing style.
• Include a blend of industry research, case studies and academic references.

3. Report Structure

You should set out your report according to the following heading structure. You should add subheadings under this overall structure as you feel fit to demonstrate your ability to on-develop the section themes and to provide meaningful sub-structure. But you must use this overall structure in order to provide a consistent framework against which your marker will allocate marks. You will be deducted marks if you do not follow this structure. Also note that there is no requirement for producing an Executive Summary.

University Cover Page

Table of contents

1. Introduction and project plan
2. Data quality issues and remedies
3. Data analysis and commentary
4. Data charting and commentary
5. Conclusions and recommendations
6. References
7. Appendix (optional)

Marking Guide

The assignment is marked out of 100 and counts towards 100% of your module mark. The following table shows the Sections, marks and marking rubric. You should iteratively self-assess your performance against the Marking Guide as you develop your draft submission, in order to evaluate your performance against your target grade.