Identify a business and build a full factor productivity spreadsheet in Excel, including data.Identify some action steps for increasing productivity. Spreadsheet needs to document the your action steps for
increasing productivity.
Assignment 1 – Productivity Spreadsheet

Read Factor Productivity Worksheet. It will explain how to do assignment 1.

Identify a business and build a full factor productivity spreadsheet in Excel, including data.
Identify some action steps for increasing productivity. Spreadsheet needs to document the your action steps for
increasing productivity.
Explain your decision in bullet points.
Submissions will be assessed on internal consistency, conciseness, and demonstration of understanding.
Factor Productivity Worksheet – Some Help
I will say this was a very hard assignment. The calculations themselves were easy. Getting the information is the hard part
that requires a bit of research. It tasks all those brain cells from other courses and your internet research skills.
Attached is the way I did the analysis for Apple in 2014. The Word file shows how I worked my way through to get all the
data. And the Excel file shows the calculations.

I hope this helps.

Factor Productivity Worksheet
Apple

So how do we get the information to do a Factor Productivity Worksheet? I started by examining the factors we are looking
for. The book gave us the following:

Productivity= Output/(Labor+Materials+Energy+Capital+Miscellaneous)

So factor productivity is just the output divided by the factors in the denominator. If we work in a production environment
we could get these expenses and hours directly from the production and accounting reports. Since most of us don’t we pick a
public company and see what we can find.

I decided to pick Apple. The first thing I did was go to Apple’s Investor relationship site to get its reports. Here is
what I found for sales data.
http://investor.apple.com/results.cfm

This gives me the quarterly sales for each product which is the numerator in our equations.

Clicking on the Q4 sales I get:
And clicking on the Q2 sales I get:
Now I have the sales for all products for the entire 2014 year. So I take this data and put it in Excel and get:

Apple Factor Productivity Worksheet

Products Q4 Q3 Q2 Q1 Total
iphone 39,272,000 35,203,000 43,719,000 37,430,000 155,624,000
Ipad 12,316,000 13,276,000 16,350,000 19,477,000 61,419,000
mac 5,520,000 4,413,000 4,136,000 3,952,000 18,021,000
ipod 2,641,000 2,926,000 2,761,000 5,633,000 13,961,000
Total 59,749,000 55,818,000 66,966,000 66,492,000 249,025,000

I totaled up all sales as well as individual sales just in case I can’t get the breakdown of labor, materials, energy,
capital, or miscellaneous.

Now I move on to getting Apple’s expenses for 2014. Those come from the report Apple files with the SEC. I can get those
from the SEC site but Apple also posts these on their investor site so I went there instead. I am looking for their 2014
annual report with financial information. I found it listed as Form 10-K. Here is a picture of it.
http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingid=1193125-14-383437

Next is to review the report for cost of labor, materials, energy, capital and total costs. We will subtract all these from
total costs to get miscellaneous costs.

As I moved through the document I saw that Apple did report yearly sales. So I did not need to find the quarterly sales and
add them up as I did earlier. Here are the given sales from Apple’s annual report.
Note: Sales are in thousands.

As I move through the 10-K annual report I start finding more information.
Here I have found capital costs under Property, plant and Equipment as $20,624,000,000

Looking through the rest of the report I had no luck on the other expenses so I went to Google and started looking for number
of employees at Apple in 2014 and I found:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/273439/number-of-employees-of-apple-since-2005/

So now we have 92,900 employees.

Next I am going to look for material costs. I could not find that in the 10-K report and had no success in google. So I
decided to try a different approach and find out the percentage of material cost to final product for an Apple product. I
found the following article that stated for a $650 retail iphone, $200 was for material and $93 labor.

How much does it cost to manufacture an iPhone?

Giving us a percentage of:

Material cost = 200/650 = 30.77%

Labor costs = 93/650 = 14.31%

Using these numbers, we can figure out material costs for all products assuming similar percentages.

Lastly we need energy costs. Again, I went on Google and found the 2014 Energy report for Apple:
Although this is in energy units, I can covert these to dollars by googline the costs per unit.

Now to put this all in Excel. See the excel sheet I have attached!