CIS 310 Assignment 1

Decision Support with Excel Project

Capacity Management Analysis
Winter 2017
DUE DATE: Monday 1/30/17 by 11:59 PM

Academic Integrity Policy: This is an individual assignment. Collaboration

with another student is not allowed. Any sharing of work or factual data between
students is not allowed. All work must be original for this project in this quarter.
You may not use work (yours or someone elses) from other classes or other
quarters. Students violating this academic integrity policy will receive zero points
for Assignment 1, an F grade in CIS310, and will be referred to the Office of
Judicial Affairs.
Project Objectives:
The purpose of this project is to perform decision-making analysis of capacity and capacity
management data using Microsoft Excel. The software we will be using for Assignment1 is
Microsoft Excel 2010, 2013 or 2016 (Note: as a CPP student, you have a free subscription to
Office 365 which includes Excel 2016).
Project Background:
You are hired as a capacity and budget analyst in a major telecommunications company. The
function you will be doing is that of a Capacity planner. Two of your core functions are doing
forecasting of Ethernet equipment deployment nationwide. As the routers you will be capacity
managing are very expensive, you are instructed to use Just in Time (JIT) methodology. As you
learned in Operations Management, JIT is one of the most efficient ways to deploy capacity, so
you dont deploy too early for financial benefits however as everything in business, it is riskier
as the project may be delayed and then you exhaust the capacity which results in lost revenue.
So JIT as the name says tries to spend capital right when its needed, not too early and not too
late. In the real world, you would need years of experience to get a feel for each service, each
office, in order to get it right and reduce risk.
Your assignment is to do analysis and reporting for this team and create an executive report
using pivot tables and other Excel functions to answer specific capacity and budget questions
that the corporation is interested in.
Over the past few years, this telecom company has seen growth and the team needs to be
proactively managing the 63 offices around the country as listed in the Trend by Office Data 110-17.xlsx file. As you can see, this network consists of sixty three offices, also known as CLLI,
that have this type of equipment. In this Trend by Office Data 1-10-17.xlsx report, you see the
offices listed twice. The first set of 63 provides trending information for 10G (10 Gigabit per
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second) followed by the same 63 offices providing 1G (1 Gigabit per second) trending data. The
Capacity Management Team that you will be supporting has four planners and this network has
five regions. There are two types of projects: Carding only or router, so if the router has
existing spare slots, you have to only install cards. In some cases, the router is out of slots, so
you have to install a new router. You will see that the number of carding jobs is higher
compared to the number of new router installations. Obviously, the new routers will incur a
higher expense as these include a new router frame with some cards, although not all the slots are
carded when initially deployed.
Note that for this assignment, you will be given next project data only for the 1Gig network.
Exhibit 1 provides information as to what is included in the Trend by Office Data.xlsx source
data file.

Exhibit 1 . Trend by Office Data 1-10-17

Column
A
B
C
D

Label
Planner
Region
LATA
CLLI

E
F

Router Type
Card Type

Spare

Inuse

Other

J
K

Totalports
%Util

L thru O

AvrgXwk

Explanation
Name of the planner assigned to this office
Specifies one of five regions that the office is located in
Number assigned to this Area Code by the FCC
Common Language Location Identifier is the office name
assigned so it can be recognized by all Telecom
companies around the world
Specifies the type of router this information is for
This network only includes 1G or 10 G (B=Gigabits per
second). 100G will be deployed later this year
Port in a card that does not have a customer assigned and
is available for assignment
Port that is not spare but rather has a working circuit
already
Ports that are taken for maintenance spares, used for test
ports, etc. These are not spare but are in use by internal
processes
Total number of ports installed in that CLLI (office)
Percent utilization. Management uses these designations
to identify office capacity status:
RED >= 90%
YELLOW .=80%
GREEN < 80%
Average weekly PORT consumption in the last X weeks,
with X being 6, 13, 26 and 52 weeks. So Avrg52wk is
the weekly consumption in the last 52 weeks (the last
year). Obviously a port cannot be split into fractions of a
unit, so this is used by the planners to get an idea of the
take rate during a given period of time. Negative
2

Planner port
growth

Planner Days of
Capacity

PlannerExhaust

Planner notes

numbers mean we lost customers during that period of

time.
Each planner inputs, based on their knowledge of the
office and the various trends, that the most likely
weekly trend will be going forward (i.e. for ALBQNM
the planner believes that the forward-looking trend is
0.15 10Gig ports will be consumed per week).
Based on planner weekly port consumption (Col P), the
report gives the planner how many calendar days of
capacity (from report date = 1/10/17) that office has for
that CardType.
Based on col Q, the program calculates the date when
this office, this cardtype will run out of spares which
means we cannot serve new customers = lost
revenue=bosses dont like this.
Planner inputs notes pertinent to that particular office

Follow the tasks listed below to complete Assignment 1.

Project Tasks:
Task1. Preparing for Assignment 1.
U

Read through the entire assignment.

NOTE: It is expected that you will have to do some research for functions such as
VLOOKUP, IF statements, PIVOT TABLES and PIVOT CHARTS etc.
Task2. Download the input file from Blackboard
U

1) From Blackboard, download the two input files from Blackboard:

Trend by Office Data 1-10-17.xlsx - This file is the starting point of your project, as it
contains the network capacity data AS OF 1-10-17 that you will use to create the new
workbook for the assignment. The field descriptions are listed in Exhibit 1 above.
Also download the AdditionalOfficeData.txt file to your computer.
Task 3. Rename the Excel workbook
1) Open the file Trend by Office Data 1-10-17.xlsx . Rename this Excel workbook as
myCapacity.xlsx. This workbook will contain multiple worksheets created in the
subsequent tasks for this assignment. The completed workbook will enable the capacity
management group to be more effective in evaluating the capacity status of its network
and what projects need to be launched as well as the cost associated with the needed
projects. At this point the only worksheet in this workbook is the Capacity Data
worksheet.
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Task 4A Create an Additional Office Data worksheet in the workbook.

1) Create a new worksheet (titled Additional Office Data) in the workbook
myCapacity.xlsx created in Task 3. Import the data from the AddiitonalOfficeData.txt
text file into this worksheet. This worksheet will contain additional data about each
office as of 1-10-17. Note that the right most column with header 1G Next Project only
applies to the card type with values of 1G in the Capacity Data worksheet (rows 65 to
127).

Task 4B. Update the Planner and Region columns in the Capacity Data Worksheet
Use the VLOOKUP function to update the Planner and Region columns (COL A and B) in the
Capacity Data worksheet based on the CLLI, with data from the Additional Office Data
worksheet. You must use the option in the VLOOKUP syntax to make sure that Excel finds an
exact match.
Task 4C. Adding office capacity status
In the Capacity Data worksheet, cell T1, add a label Capacity Status. In column T, using an
IF statement, derive for each 1G and 10 G an office capacity status of GREEEN, YELLOW or
RED based on the following guideline as stated in Exhibit 1, column K (%Util).
Office Capacity Status
RED >= 90%
YELLOW .>=80%
GREEN < 80%

Task 4D. Adding 1G Next Project

In the Capacity Data worksheet, cell U1, add a label 1G next project. Use the VLOOKUP
function to update (for CardType of 1G only) from the Additional Office Data worksheet. You
must use the option in the VLOOKUP syntax to make sure that you find an exact match.
Task 4E. Adding 1G Next Project
In the Capacity Data worksheet, cell V1, add a label 1G project cost. Use the VLOOKUP
function to update (for CardType of 1G only) from the Additional Office Data worksheet. You
must use the option in the VLOOKUP syntax to make sure that you find an exact match
Task 5. Create a new Summary worksheet in the workbook.

1) Create a new worksheet (titled Summary) in the workbook (myCapacity.xlsx) created in

Task 3. The purpose of this worksheet is to summarize data contained in the Capacity
Data worksheet based on pivot tables requested on task 6.
The content and format of the Summary worksheet must be based on the Summary
Worksheet Layout in Exhibit 2 below.
IMPORTANT NOTE: This information comes from the Pivot tables created in Task 6.
You can either link the results to this summary worksheet, or copy/paste the data from
Pivot tables. In either case, the results in the summary need to match the results in those
worksheets.

Exhibit. 2 Summary Worksheet Layout

Capacity Summary
As of January 10, 2017
Offices per planner

xx
xx
xx
xx

Brad
Jason
Mike
Rudy

Region

Total
funding
needed per
planner for
1G projects

Highest %
utilization
per planner

Number of
yellow
and red
offices per
planner

Total
number of
card + frame
projects per
planner

xx

xx
xx
xx
xx

xx
xx
xx
xx

xx
xx
xx
xx

xx
xx
xx
xx

xx
xx
xx
xx
xx

xx
xx
xx
xx
xx

% of all offices
per planner
xx
xx
xx

Offices
(CLLIs) per
region

xx
xx
xx
xx
xx

E
MW
SE
SW
W
Input your
PT6MyReport
finding in this
space

xx
xx
xx
xx
xx

HINT: The list in the Capacity Data worksheet includes 10 Gig data, followed by 1 Gig data for the same set of offices.
An office is assigned to the same planner for 1Gig and 10Gig.
Note: use results from pivot tables in Task 6 to determine summary values and replace xx in each column/row with
appropriate values.

Task 6. Create several new worksheets (in the MyCapacity workbook) for data analysis.
Your supervisor wants to analyze the Capacity Data at varying levels of detail. For example,
your supervisor realizes that the workload is not balanced amongst the planners so he/she needs
to look at the office load for each planner. Analysis such as offices per planner, offices per
region, status of the offices, which planner has the most reds and yellow status offices, etc. Your
boss also needs to complete performance ratings and performance rankings so he/she is looking
for your analysis of the available data. So he/shed like for you use these tools to provide
answers to the following questions:

1. Number of offices per planner. Although some offices are more active than others, the
supervisor wants to know the office workload per planner. That is, he/she wants to know
the count of offices per planner. In addition, he/she wants to know the planner with the
highest percentage of offices assigned with respect to the total number of offices. Sort
your table based on planner name, from A Z.
Create a Pivot Table report in a worksheet titled PT1PlannerOffices

2. What is the count of CLLIs (offices) for each of the five regions? Also, give the
percentages of the offices for each region in comparison to the same data for the other
regions. Create a pie chart showing the percentage of offices for each region compared
all offices in the regions.
Create a PivotTable AND a PivotChart report (2 D Pie Chart) in the worksheet
titled PT2OfficesperRegion. Make sure to include BOTH, the PivotTable and
PivotChart, on the same worksheet. Add a descriptive title to the PivotChart and
format it with appropriate labels for each slice of the pie. Create a user-friendly
presentation style. Be creative in formatting the chart.
.
3. For performance purposes, the supervisor in interested in how many RED and YELLOW
per planner there are for both 1G and 10G card types.
Create a PivotTable report PT3YellowRed. This pivot table needs to show a
matrix with counts of green, yellow and red for each of the 4 planner names.
Pivot table should also show Grand totals per planner and Grand Total for all
offices (the latter will be a grand total of 126)
4. For the 1G Cardtype only, how many card projects and how many frame projects does
each planner have. Also, for each planner and for each type of project, how much budget
(money) does each planner need ? What is the total count of projects and total funding
needed per planner ?
Create a PivotTable report in the worksheet titled PT4ProjectsFunding. Grand
total for the count of all projects will be 63.
5. Other than capped offices (Capped offices are identified in col S Planner Notes), which
planner has the office with the highest (max) utilization (for all %util for all 1G or 10G).
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Also, include in this pivot table the lowest utilization (min) for each of the planners.
Highlight in bold text the planner row who has the highest non-red utilization (< 90%).
So this planner manages risk the best compared to his/her peers but needs to bring up the
lowest utilization to show that he is not deploying equipment too soon.
Create a PivotTable report in the worksheet titled PT5MinMax.

6. Create a PivotTable and PivotChart of your choice.

Create a PivotTable report AND a PivotChart report (of your choice) in the
worksheet titled PT6MyReport (include both reports in the worksheet). At the
top of this worksheet you must include a statement that states your problem
statement (what are you trying to analyze). Add a descriptive chart title and
format it with appropriate labels for a user-friendly presentation style. Be creative
in formatting the chart.
Your problem statement can be about anything related to the analysis of the
MyCapacity workbook data. However, to receive full credit for #6, your problem
statement must not be identical or very similar to the problem statements in
questions #1 thru #5. Enter the problem statement in cell A1 of worksheet titled
PT6MyReport. Furthermore, make sure that the chosen chart type is relevant to
the analyses of the problem statement. Next
Assignment 1 Deliverable and point distribution:
Assignment 1 is worth 50 points. You will turn in one file for Assignment 1. The file will be an
electronic, working copy of your Excel workbook that meets the criteria specified in Tasks 1 - 6
(see above). The file will be in Excel 2013 or 2016 format (.xlsx) and will contain ALL of the
worksheets created by performing Tasks 1 - 6. When you turn in Assignment 1 file for grading,
your worksheets MUST appear in the following order (from left to right):
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

Completed Capacity Data and Additional Capacity Data (5 points)

Summary worksheet (7 points)
PT1PlannerOffices (3 points)
PT2OfficesperRegion (8 points)
PT3YellowRed (5 points)
PT4ProjectsFunding (7 points)
PT5MaxMinUtil (7 points)
PT6MyReport (8 points)

Rename the Excel file you created for Assignment 1 (i.e., myCapacity.xlsx) to the following
naming convention: first initial, last name, a1 (e.g., for Andy Smith's assignment the file will be
named asmitha1.xlsx). Upload your file to Blackboard using the appropriate upload links
provided.