Overview

Emerging technologies can change an organisation’s business model dramatically. Spreadsheets in Excel are often used to estimate the effectiveness of a business model. You will need to do use Excel to calculate how an emerging technology will impact on an organisation’s revenues and costs. To do this you will need skills in Excel. This lab assumes you familiar with Excel as taught in ITECH1100 Understanding the Digital Revolution. If you are not confident with your basic Excel skills step yourself through the Refresher_Excel_Basics.pdf you can download from Moodle.

This lab (and next weeks) on Excel will introduce Excel with a case study problem of a business model: A pizza maker has teamed up with a pilot and information technology specialist to create a business model where they intend to rent premises in low cost outer-suburbs, instead of expensive central locations. They want to deploy drones to deliver the pizzas instead of ‘Uber-food’ style contractors but are not sure if this will be worthwhile. Drones are expensive to buy, need to be maintained, need to be replaced, sometimes crash and can’t fly at all in bad weather. Contractor delivery drivers won’t work if they can’t make enough money.  The industry is very competitive and pizza shops open and close often.

Task Details

Exercise 1  Submit

You will get the most out of this Lab by doing the tasks yourself before seeing how I have done each task.  There is no standardised, ‘correct’ way to use Excel for a business model especially when you want to compare a business model before and after a disruptive technology. Do the exercises then compare yours with mine (on Moodle Week 2). the way you have done each task and a brief comment about how your task is different from mine.  Hint (mine will not always be good)

1. Create the following worksheets 

a. Assumptions, 

b. Pizzas Delivered by Drones, 

c. Pizza’s Delivered by Humans 

d. Comparisons

e. Points of Reflections

2. Enter the assumptions in the table below in your Assumptions worksheet

3. Generate monthly costs, revenue for 24 months for the Drone and for the Human on the separate worksheets. Make your costs, revenues as generic as possible so that you can change an entry in the Assumptions and the costs and revenues will automatically update. Don’t look at mine on Moodle until you finish yours. 

4. In your Points of Reflection Worksheet describe your assessment of the assumptions and whether you think they are reasonable. Would you invest in a drone delivered pizza service if you had money? How is your spreadsheet different to the one on Moodle? Which is clearer or more generic? Can you identify mistakes in the one on Moodle?