COM502 Analytical Writing for Management Students-2025

To: MBA Class Of 2026

From: Instructor

Subject: Assignment question for case discussion and report submission

Assignment: Case Report-1 Expansion Strategy for Express Bike Works

You are expected to apply concepts, techniques, and tools that you have learnt so far in
other courses to a case situation, integrate your learning from the various disciplines and
subjects, and present your analysis in a report. This is an Individual Assignment. The size
of the report should be 1200 words.

Deadline for Submission: Sunday, February 16, 2024, at 11:55 PM.

Niraj Taksande, the founder of Express Bike Works (EBW), is considering expanding his
automated bike-washing business in South India. His key challenge is choosing between self-
owned and franchise stores while determining optimal locations to maximize profitability.
As a consultant, you have been hired to provide a recommendation for EBW’s expansion
strategy.

Please analyse the decision problem and communicate your recommendations with a proper
action plan in the written format provided below.

Format of the Report

Letter of Transmittal

Situation Analysis (SA)

1. This is the most important part of your report because the rest is built on it. It shows
your reading or analysis of the situation. It is neither a description of the situation nor
a summary of case facts. This is where you zero in on the facts that you consider
relevant for decision-making and indicate the relationships that you perceive between
those facts.
2. If you analyse the situation well, you will have no difficulty defining the problem or the
managerial challenge faced by the protagonist in the case. When structuring your
situation analysis, please remember that merely stating facts is not sufficient. You
need to draw your analysis from the same.
Problem Statement

1. This is where the objective to be achieved is identified. It flows from your analysis of
the situation.

The Options

1. Once you define the problem, the next step is to generate different ways of solving it.
These are the options/alternatives available to the decision-maker.
2. The ideal options are mutually exclusive, that is, if you opt for A, you cannot also opt
for B or C. If, for example, you want to buy a TV set, the options are the different TV
sets available for you to buy.
3. It is obvious that choosing any one of the TV sets automatically rules out buying any
other TV set. For good decision-making it is important to generate credible options,
that is, options that have a reasonable chance of being adopted. This is where your
creativity should help you. However, do steep your creativity in reality!

Criteria for Evaluation

1. Faced with different options, how do we identify the best? By developing criteria and
evaluating each option against the generated criteria. Criteria are the norms that an
option should meet for it to be adopted as the solution.

2. In the TV purchase example, the norms could be price, quality, brand, physical size,
and after-sales service. These criteria are not universal; they stem from the analysis
of a given situation. Price, for example, may not be a consideration in some families
while it may be the most important criterion in some.

3. Identifying the best option is relatively simple if there is just one criterion. If there are
multiple criteria, you should prioritize them; in other words, you should indicate which
criterion is the most important and which criteria are less important. If an option fails
the most important criterion, it cannot be adopted even if it meets all the other
criteria.

4. Try and restrict the number of criteria to three or four. Too many criteria rob the writer
of the space to argue cogently on an issue. The prioritization of criteria stems from
the analysis of the situation. You may need to justify your prioritization unless it is
obvious.

Evaluation of Options

Once you have prioritized the criteria, apply them to ALL the options identified. It is not
enough to apply them to one of the most promising options.

The Recommendation
 1. Now you are ready to make your recommendation. It is the option that has met all the
identified criteria.
2. If none of the options meet the requirements of all the criteria, the option that meets
most of the criteria, especially the most important one(s), is the one that you
recommend to the decision-maker.
3. If the options do not meet the criteria, you may want to go back to the analysis of the
situation, generate more options, and repeat the process. Not in the report, please!
Your planning stage should address this issue.

Action Plan

1. A decision which is not backed by actionable is redundant! Once you recommend

Contingency Plan

1. With the action plan, your report is complete. We, however, ask you to go an extra
mile. Anticipate things that may go wrong when the recommendation is put into
action.
2. One contingency in the TV purchase example might be a temporary shortage of the
chosen size and brand if the situation analysis had hinted at some production or
distribution problems. You need to suggest what to do in such a contingency.
3. That is your contingency plan. Your contingency plan should NOT be adoption of one
of the rejected options. A good contingency plan enhances your report.
4. You shouldn’t, however, look for outlandish contingencies just to fill in a slot in the
report. While you are advised to put on your thinking hat and suggest a contingency
plan, it is not a mandate!

Exhibits

Exhibits are tables, charts, graphs, worksheets, and other similar data collections that
support your report's argument. Incorporating such data as running text in the report may
make the report unnecessarily lengthy and less readable. Some reports may not have
any exhibits, while others may have several.

If you have any exhibits, give them brief, explanatory titles and number them according
to the order in which they are mentioned in the body of the report. If you have only one or
two small exhibits, you may place them in the body of the report, close to where they are
mentioned. But if the exhibits are many, place them at the end of the report in the same
order as they have been mentioned in the body of the report. Your decision on where to
place the exhibits should be based on readability.

Don’t place discussions, analyses, and interpretations in exhibits; these should be a part
of the main body of the report. Don’t give orphan exhibits either – tables and charts not
mentioned in the body of the report. And do remember to include all the exhibits that are
mentioned in the report.
 Please refer to the next page on how exhibits must be prepared and presented.

The style for presentation of exhibits*

 Select a suitable font size and line spacing so that the exhibits are legible, make
sense and look tidy.
 Number all exhibits in the order they appear in the text and give each a short,
descriptive title. In other words, the first exhibit mentioned in the text is numbered
one, the next two, and so on. (If there is only one exhibit, it is just called Exhibit; it is
not numbered but must have a title.)
 Present exhibits in the serial number order.
 Avoid splitting the exhibit into two pages when it is small enough to fit into one. If it
cannot, break it sensibly. (For instance, do not have ‘3000x4’ on one page and
‘=12000’ on the next.) Number and title of the exhibit and the word (continued) next
to it: Exhibit 3 (Contd.)
 Mention the appropriate unit of measurement for quantities shown in the exhibit.
 Place a heading for every column and every row.
 Right-align columns with numbers.
 If “verbal” exhibits are used, their words will be counted towards the word limit,
except for SWOT analysis.
 State the assumptions made and formulae used in your calculations in the exhibit.
 Explain how you have arrived at numbers (the method you have used to interpret and
analyze the data) used in the exhibit unless the numbers are copied from the case.
 When you use shading, colours or other means to distinguish data in pie charts,
graphs, bar graphs, etc., remember that printed copy may not have as sharp
demarcations as you see on a soft copy.

* Adapted from Rao, S.S. (1970). A style manual for writing. Ahmedabad: Faculty Publication, p-49.