Earlier in the year we started to analyse the sales profile for the stationery business stream within Hothouse.  The areas of initial investigation were selected as the management of our sales team, our customer base, website effectiveness, and an analysis of our most successful product lines.  In some of these cases the initial data collection has now been completed and samples of this data are included within this draft report.  Other data will need to be collected and collated prior to the next meeting of the management comitee. 

Surname	Forename	Responsibility	
Pollard	Christine	Sales Manager	
Smith	Christopher	Shop	
Smith	Ian	Telephone Sales	
Khan	Jamal 	Website	
O'Keefe	Patrick 	Website	
Trapionni	Roberto 	Stock Control	
Park	Kim Sun	Shop	
Pires	Chico	Website	

Another possibility to help reduce staff turnover would be to offer sales incentives to those who help to increase sales.  This would be in place of the enhanced wages.  It could operate in one of two ways, either the entire team get bonuses if sales reach pre-defined targets or individual bonuses could be awarded.  Each of these schemes has its own merits.  The first idea gives a sense of a team, where they are working for each other and the second idea would make individuals strive to sell more items, although it does little to promote the team approach.  Possible timings for these bonuses include:
•	weekly
•	monthly
•	quarterly
•	annually.

As a consequence of these ideas, we need to look at similar incentive schemes in other businesses to see if they have had the required effect on their staff.  This needs to be researched by next Friday.

The review of the house styles for the website update that is currently in development has been subtly changed.  Some further changes to this need to be made, but this sample gives an idea of some of the styles suggested for the latest version of the stylesheet:

p	{color: #00ff22; font-family: arial, helvetica}
li	{color: #ff0000; font-family: times, “times new roman”; font-size: smaller}
h3 	{color: #00ff22; font-family: arial, helvetica, font-size: larger}

These styles will need updating before they can be applied to the website.  Other useful data needs to include a snapshot of a single day’s trading.  This data has been recently updated to reflect the changing staff within the sales department.  The table of data below shows the sum of the number of individual items sold per employee and the count of the number of individual transactions in a single day’s trading:

The number of individual transactions per employee can also been seen graphically:

There is a separate briefing note attached to this document which identifies the tasks for each of you during the next few days.  Please refer to that, and if you have any questions please contact me on extension 144 or by e-mail at other.an@hothouse-design.co.uk 

The current sales team has a mixture of staff, some of whom are long established and are likely to remain with the company for the foreseeable future.  Many of the more recent recruits are being paid minimal wages and there tends to be a high staff turnover.  With the increasing cost of training staff in customer relations, there is surely a case for increasing the rates of pay of these members of the department.  In the long term it is likely to pay dividends, as the costs of staff recruitment and training in this area far surpass those paid to our employees in wages.  The need for training would not be entirely removed, but initial feasibility studies suggest that more than 80% of the training and recruitment budget for this department could be saved.  If half of this saving was used to fund pay rises for the current employees, it would increase their hourly rate by an average of 27%.  This would encourage our employees to stay, yet still save us 40% of our annual training and recruitment budget for the department.  Those people currently employed are: