Indian Institute of Management Calcutta EPBM XIV

Information Technology Module

Final Examination Marks: 100
This is a take-home examination to be taken individually. Any form of copying will be awarded ZERO marks and could involve other forms of severe punishment. The objective of this test is to test your ability to map a decision making situation onto Excel. Taking the test would entail deploying appropriate Excel functions and features for collecting necessary data from the web, building a model, and presenting the outcome. It is in no way a test of your programming skills. Uniqueness, flexibility, elegance will be few of the points on which your work is going to be evaluated. Make reasonable assumptions wherever necessary and state them clearly in your process note. Your submission will be in the form of an excel workbook named as <Student_Id>_ITExam. The work book will contain the spreadsheet requested, all data that you have used, source of data in the form of URLs and a process note. The process note talks about your assumptions and your thought process regarding data, model and presentation of outcome. Also mention difficulties you faced. Remember that a workbook without Data sources and Process Note will not be evaluated. Please e-mail the work book to exam4epbm@yahoo.in only. E-mails, sent to yahoo group will not be considered. Submission Deadline is 11:00 P.M., Monday February 14, 2011. No submission will be accepted after the deadline. Avoid waiting until the last moment and submit early. The instructor is not going to be responsible for your failure to mail the file.

Custom Vacation Inc.1

You have been given the responsibility of preparing a spreadsheet that helps one to plan custom vacation packages for families. The final outcome would be a nice vacation within a given budget and a given time span. While the scope of the work is pretty flexible, there are certain expectations that need to be met. You have the complete freedom to decide what the dimensions of nice are. (a) There should be option of constructing a tour circuit by first selecting a state to visit, using a drop down list on the visual display. The list of tourist destinations should then appear automatically depending on the choice. The tour circuit will be constructed by choosing towns of tourist interest from this list, and deciding on the sequence in which the places will be visited. For example a client could choose Bihar as the state to visit and then construct the circuit with Patna, Nalanda, Rajgir and Gaya in that order. (b) To increase flexibility in travel time, there could be a facility for selecting mode of transport. (c) For the tour circuit your spreadsheet should allow for analysing two package options based on mode of transport (Air, Train, Car), and hotel quality (star rating, customer feedback etc.) for travelling from one place to other, activities, side tours and length of vacation. A tour starts from the first city and ends in the last one. Analysis of each package should result in a visual output of bar graphs comparing scores in budget, flexibility, and other metrics of your choice. Remember that outputs need to be scaled so that comparisons can be made on the same chart for the package options that can also be selected through radio buttons on Option 1 or Option 2 (radio buttons are simple extension of the checkboxes). (d) Each bar graph should also have check box options to enable selection of various modes of transportation (Air and car; Air, Car and Train; Train only etc.). (e) There should be a way of giving the clients some idea about how much it would be if bought now vs. two months later (this is in consideration of the significant savings that could accrue if the flight is booked much in advance). The bottom line is that this would enable the client to get a clear feel of What would constitute getting the most out of his/her trip. At the time of conceptualizing the model, you may keep the following guidelines in mind: a) The users of the spreadsheet will be city persons and that feature in the decision making b) The budget would be flexible with an upper limit. But (s)he would want value for money and would feel comfortable if it is kept within certain limit.
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The problem was suggested by Prof. Kalachand Seal of Loyola Marymount University, LA

c) Tours and trips must be carefully considered d) A bad hotel will quickly ruin the trip and also the user would have high expectation for the services that (s)he pay good money for. You will have to download from web all necessary data like airfare, the distance, rates for the type of cars needed, temperature of the place, hotel charges, etc needed for creating the spreadsheet.