Putting It Together: Reports

You’ve finally put together your proposal for prepackaged dinner kits. You’re excited that your idea is ready to be reviewed by Mr. Marks, the store owner. You were surprised how long it took to pull this together and keep up on your regular job—two months!

You’re fairly confident in the work you produced: you made notes about exactly what you were trying to do, and that helped you find the information you needed. The process even included planning and collecting the results from a short survey.

Knowing your the owner well and knowing that the information could be easily summarized, you put together an informal proposal with just a few simple headings. With this decision made, you wrote up your proposal as a memo.

The not-so-fun part turned out better than expected. The outline that you created before writing seemed like a pain at the time, but it sure made the writing go much more quickly. The outline helped you remember to lay out how you found your information and how credible the information was. The prewriting process even gave you ideas as you wrote the content for each section.

Once the proposal was complete, you sent it off to Mr. Marks:

Example of a report for a project proposal. It is addressed "To: Mr. Anthony Marks, Store Owner". It is "From: Ms. Sofia Ruiz, Produce Manager". The date is "March 19, 2018". The subject is "Proposal to Create New Product- Assembled Dinner Boxes". The content reads: "Please find the information you requested regarding possibly creating a new store product similar to what Blue Apron and HelloFresh offer. This report is organized by the description of your initial request, the way data was found to address the parts of the request, and what results were obtained. Knowing that the information is to be reviewed with consultants, no recommendation is made. Problem Statement: Determine the cost model and potential customer demand for a store product where ingredients for a ready-made dinner is priced and sold. Background: Meal-kit services are becoming increasingly popular, and are heavily marketed, potentially driving customers away from traditional grocery shopping. These kits provide ready-made ingredient sets with directions to make contemporary meals at home. These kits cost about $60 per week and serve three meals for two. Additionally, customers have if we had something similar to these services. This small grocery store has been looking for low cost ways to increase sales without being forced into new product lines that it does not now much about (like equipment rentals for things like carpet cleaners and grills). Research: Customer Demand. To determine the likely customer demand and willingness to pay, an informal survey was created to ask various regular customers. Regular customers were selected since they would be the ones who would be in the most often and most likely to purchase on a regular basis. The survey had a target of 30 qualified potential buyers of the new product. It turns out that 35 surveys were collected. Rather than approaching those customers who already mentioned a desire for this product, as other customers checked out over the past-week they were casually asked the following: How often do you shop with us? (If the response was more than two times a month, the next questions was asked). How many individuals do you usually cook dinner for? (If the response was two, then the next question was asked). Would you be willing to try a new recipe for beef, chicken, fish or vegetarian, if the ingredients were already collected for a small fee? how much is the most you would be willing to pay for a nice week-night dinner for two that can be prepared quickly? $2-8, $9-14, or $15 and up. Here are the results of the qualified 35 responses, based on those checking out the week of March 5 through march 16 during the afternoon shift. Willing to try prepackaged: 19 yes 9 no 7 unsure. Willing to pay: $3-8 was 10, $9-14 was 20, $15 and up was 5. Research: Costs. A sample recipe that could be priced for was to determine how much each kit would cost. Knowing that Blue Apron is slightly less expensive than other products on the market, two sample recipes were acquired and priced against the same ingredients in our store.

Click to view the full report.

It seems the report and project is off to a good start. Mr. Marks received the memo and responded with a quick email: “Sofia, thank you for this information. It looks very thorough and well thought out. I’ll be eager to review this with my consultants. You have a good eye for this work.”