Assignment

Your Chief Executive Officer (CEO) calls you into his or her office and wants you to take on a valuable project related to the upcoming 5-year strategic plan. You will work directly under the auspices of the Chief Financial Officer in developing the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) of the exogenous (external) macro-economic factors that will need to be considered in developing micro based revenue, expense and profitability forecasts for your company or any organization you are familiar with.

The CEO takes out a piece of scratch paper and provides the outline and expectations. These notes include:

1. Meet with the Corporate Sales Manager and ask for the drivers of your own corporate revenue streams.  What about elasticity /sensitivity analysis?

2. Meet with the production or expense managers and determine the drivers of expenses; for example, labor cost, unemployment rate, raw materials cost if you are a manufacturing facility.

3. Identify the positive economic data; the situation of a selection of no more than 4 key series of data and sources of drivers of micro performance.  This could include time series data on consumption, consumer price index, consumer confidence, interest rates, inflation, and productivity (for example) as outlined from your interviews.  He asks that you include the URL or sources

4. Your deliverable is to provide a check list in a memo form on your findings and how the economic data series you selected is needed to assess sales and resource needs over the next 5 years and the relationship between the data as inputs into your company sales and expense forecasts.

5. Consider listing any ethical implications of the forecast to the wider community.

6. Take a breath and note the deliverable below.

The purpose of this assignment in addition to discovery of the link between exogenous economic data to your own industry is to find and network with subject experts in your own company.

As you write this strategic planning 2-page memo, consider including the following components that include an introduction to your business audience, clarification of terms via definitions. Discuss why you think the series is valuable to your firm and the result of your interviews.  This is a MEMO; therefore, it needs to look professional.  You need the From and to designations, etc.  This is NOT an essay where you are going to need references, cover page etc. A Note that this needs to be as professional as possible.  If you do not know how to write a memo, be sure to look on the internet.