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What a hard exam – messed up the variances I think
Q1 had a lot of marks to find – no real non financial indicators sustainability of returns – didn’t give capital employed — balanced scorecard was seemingly following that method., bringing in other parts of scorecard. Narrative commentary gave a risk, Growth figures mentioned percentage points not actual growth
Second part explanation of ir and capitals – maintainence creates value etc.
Last part got 6-7 factors for the benchmarking. Cost per staff member, operating profit per investment in projects, roce, revenue growth, average score for project value assessment thing.
Question two with the holiday company was fine, building blocks likes the warning. I think it wanted other metric suggests if nessary, online booking etc, costs per sales sales was narrow should be revenue per call, so call is more resource utilised
Hated question 3 did three variance but was it wanting that reconciling to the overall figure – other part was easy
I had the questions on e-commerce, benchmarking and cloud computing for Q1, performance pyramid and reward schemes for Q2 and big data and ethics for Q3 and thought it was pretty easy, way easier than the mocks I’ve been doing so was a strange one, fingers crossed everyone passed
I got the same exam as you.
I found it really hard as well. Felt like the 3 hours was over in a flash :/
The last question was horrible on variances. One was fine two was fine
Sustainable roce needed figures from competitors and I also mentioned that EMA could be useful. Get the expenses out so they could see the environmental costs and seek to reduce them whilst maximise profit
The question on the unified database was straight forward. Better pricing, better marketing saving costs, offer complimentary holiday tours based on information from electronic ordering
The building blocks was fine too. Quality measured by revenue and repeat customers. Could bring in awards and undertake customer surveys.
Innovation had the most – but to measure it you’d need to get the amount of customers using the online ticket sustem. Number of online visits.
Resources utilisation mention the fact that the staff costs per phone call is imprecise, revenue per sales call is better, also doesn’t measure all staff on phone the measure given.
Customer measured by repeat customers but other factors could be suggested.
I had this question set too. Keen to find out how you answered the performance pyramid one. My luck that one of my least studied areas came up!
How did you answer the questions to each of the 9 titles of the performance pyramid?
I am sitting this exam on Friday – I assume my questions will be completely different to what everyone sat today?
I had the same exam with Q1 – e-commerce, benchmarking, outsourcing to cloud, Q2 – performance pyramid & rewards, Q3 – ethics.
Felt more like an SBL exam…no calc required in any of the questions, maybe a bit in Q1, but nothing major. Feel very lucky with the questions assigned.
I had the same exam. E commerce, big data, ethics, performance pyramid
With the performance pyramid, I tried to do what the question asked me to do.
Which was to assess how their Corporate Steering Wheel addresses the 9 headers of the performance pyramid.
I just went through each measure in the Corporate Steering Wheel and explained what it covered in the Performance Pyramid and explained which ones were not covered. I tried to add some things about the performance pyramid such as how each level supports the level above. I also tried to link it back to their financial objective of maximising shareholder value, I suggusted a better measure of this and briefly explained the advantages and disadvantages of the new measure. I might lose some professional marks for that, as the question didnt really ask for a recommendation but I felt it was relevant.
I too found the exam quite straightforward compared to past exams and am a bit anxious I’ve failed to notice something in the case studies or in the questions.
This is my final exam so hope I pass! Good luck to everyone!
The question on Big data had so much to read, i lost time and could not complete that question at all
Performance reports and IR were fairly good but too much readying in exhibits eat up a good time. ERP and Building Block questions were too much time consuming then variance questions was tricky but I was not panic done fairly good after catching a method to calculate by ops and plan variance of material price and then labor efficiency variance and finally able separate gross profit margin variance amount responsible by production manager $0.13 for material price variance and $0.08 for labor efficiency variance and balance variance due to operational variance in price (3% inflation instead of 6%)
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