Case Study Of St. Anny Food Company

To investigate the root causes about forecasting accuracy of St. Anny Food Company, appropriate research design need to be determined. Hence, this chapter will illustrate the methodologies which are suitable for conducting this research.

Linking to the research questions, the major entity which will be analyzed in the study need to be determined. Also, the unit on which one collects data will be presented. The section 3.2 will illustrate the unit of analysis and unit of observation in the research case of St. Anny Food Company. These descriptions are important to conducting the research since they are closely related with the goal of the research. In addition to this, previous chapters have introduced the cause and effect diagram (refer to

Anny, the inductive approach is appropriate for investigate the research topic. Firstly, it makes more sense to ask the questions that directly linking to the research objective, and then analyzing the data towards problem solving. For instance, in order to find out whether lacking of the knowledge and/or awareness of forecasting is an important cause for inaccuracy forecasting, structured interviews with people who are responsible for forecasting can be designed. Hence, the researcher can better understand what was going on and the nature of the problem. Meanwhile, by analyzing the interview data, the researcher may discover that there are other important reasons that lead to inaccurate forecasting. More precisely, in-depth interview with some people who are staying on the managerial positions can help to get a feel of what is the real managerial issue of the company that influence the forecast accuracy. For example, asking operations manager how many times per month, per season or per year does the stock out phenomenon occurs, and how they coped with the problem before. Besides these, concerning reliability and validity, induction approach can ensure lower risks such as non-return of questionnaires and enhance the quality of the survey. Therefore, the inductive research approach is the best choice for conducting the research of St. Anny

Questionnaires and interviews are the two techniques to support primary data collection in this research. When it refers to questionnaires, it is important to reaching particular person such as operations manager as respondent because he is very familiar with the investigate topic. Moreover, the types of question that need to ask to collect data must be designed properly. When it comes to interview, data can be gathered in a more purposeful way. At result, the analysis can directly contribute to conclusions and recommendations, and therefore, meet the thesis objective