题目内容

Callisto Retail (Callisto) is an on-line reseller of local craft products related to the historic culture of the country of Callistan. The business started ten years ago as a hobby of two brothers, Jeff and George. The brothers produced humorous, short video clips about Callistan which were posted on their website and became highly popular. They decided to use the website to try to sell Callistan merchandise and good initial sales made them believe that they had a viable business idea.
Callisto has gone from strength to strength and now boasts sales of $120m per annum, selling anything related to Callistan. Callisto is still very much the brothers’ family business. They have gathered around themselves a number of strategic partners into what Jeff describes as a virtual company. Callisto has the core functions of video clip production, finance and supplier relationship management. The rest of the functions of the organisation (warehousing, delivery and website development) are outsourced to strategic partners.
The brothers work from their family home in the rural North of Callistan while other Callisto employees work from their homes in the surrounding villages and towns. These employees are involved in video editing, system maintenance, handling customer complaints and communication with suppliers and outsourcers regarding inventory. The employees log in to Callisto’s systems via the national internet infrastructure. The outsourced functions are handled by multinational companies of good reputation who are based around the world. The brothers have always been fascinated by information technology and so they depend on email and electronic data interchange to communicate with their product suppliers and outsourcing partners.
Recently, there have been emails from regular customers of the Callisto website complaining about slow or non-delivery of orders that they have placed. George has commented that this represents a major threat to Callisto as the company operates on small profit margins, relying on volume to drive the business. He believes that sales growth will drive the profitability of the business due to its cost structure.
Jeff handles the management of outsourcing and has been reviewing the contracts that exist between Callisto and its strategic partner for warehousing and delivery, RLR Logistics. The current contract for warehousing and delivery is due for renewal in two months and currently, has the following service level agreements (SLAs):
1. RLR agree to receive and hold inventory from Callisto’s product suppliers.
2. RLR agree to hold 14 days inventory of Callisto’s products.
3. RLR agree to despatch from their warehouse any order passed from Callisto within three working days, inventory allowing.
4. RLR agree to deliver to customers anywhere in Callistan within two days of despatch.
Breaches in these SLAs incur financial penalties on a sliding scale depending on the number and severity of the problems. Each party to the contract collects their own data on performance and this has led to disagreements in the past over whether service levels have been achieved although no penalties have been triggered to date. The most common disagreement arises over inventory levels held by RLR with RLR claiming that it cannot be expected to deliver products that are late in arriving to inventory due to the product suppliers’ production and delivery issues.
Required:
Assess the difficulties of performance measurement and performance management in complex business structures such as Callisto, especially in respect of the performance of their employees and strategic partners.

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Ganymede University (GU) is one of the three largest universities in Teeland, which has eight universities in total. All of the universities are in the public sector. GU obtains the vast majority of its revenue through government contracts for academic research and payments per head for teaching students. The economy of Teeland has been in recession in the last year and this has caused the government to cut funding for all the universities in the country.
In order to try to improve efficiency, the chancellor of the university, who leads its executive board, has asked the head administrator to undertake an exercise to benchmark GU’s administration departments against the other two large universities in the country, AU and BU. The government education ministry has supported this initiative and has required all three universities to cooperate by supplying information.
The following information has been collected regarding administrative costs for the most recent academic year:
The key drivers of costs and revenues have been assumed to be research contract values supported, student numbers and total staff numbers. The head administrator wants you to complete the benchmarking and make some preliminary comment on your results.
Required:
(a) Assess the progress of the benchmarking exercise to date, explaining the actions that have been undertaken and those that are still required. (8 marks)
(b) Evaluate, as far as possible, Ganymede University’s benchmarked position. (9 marks)

Section A – BOTH questions are compulsory and MUST be attempted
Metis is a restaurant business in the city of Urbanton. Metis was started three years ago by three friends who met at university while doing courses in business and catering management. Initially, their aim was simply to ‘make money’ although they had talked about building a chain of restaurants if the first site was successful.
The three friends pooled their own capital and took out a loan from the Grand Bank in order to fit out a rented site in the city. They designed the restaurant to be light and open with a menu that reflected the most popular dishes in Urbanton regardless of any particular culinary style. The dishes were designed to be priced in the middle of the range that was common for restaurants in the city. The choice of food and drinks to offer to customers is still a group decision amongst the owners.
Other elements of the business were allocated according to each owner’s qualifications and preferences. Bert Fish takes charge of all aspects of the kitchen operations while another, Sheila Plate, manages the activities in the public area such as taking reservations, serving tables and maintaining the appearance of the restaurant. The third founder, John Sum, deals with the overall business issues such as procurement, accounting and legal matters.
Competition in the restaurant business is fierce as it is easy to open a restaurant in Urbanton and there are many competitors in the city both small, single-site operations and large national chains. The current national economic environment is one of steady but unspectacular growth.
The restaurant has been running for three years and the founders have reached the point where the business seems to be profitable and self-sustaining. The restaurant is now in need of refurbishment in order to maintain its atmosphere and this has prompted the founders to consider the future of their business. John Sum has come to you as their accountant looking for advice on aspects of performance management in the business. He has supplied you with figures outlining the recent performance of the business and the forecasts for the next year (see the performance report below). This table represents the quantitative data that is available to the founders when they meet each quarter to plan any short-term projects or initiatives and also, to consider the longer-term future. Bert and Sheila have often indicated to John that they find the information daunting and difficult to understand fully.
John Sum has come to you to advise him on the performance reporting at Metis and how it could be improved. He feels that the current report is, in some ways, too complex and, in other ways, too simple. He wants to look at different methods of measuring and presenting performance to the ownership group. As a starting point, he has suggested to you that you consider measures such as NPV, EVA？, MIRR as well as the more common profit measures. John is na？ve and wants the NPV and MIRR to be appraised as if the business was a three-year project up to 2012 so he knows the performance of the business to date. He has requested that other calculations in your performance review should be annual based on the 2012 figures although he is aware that this may be omitting in his words ‘some important detail’.
At recent meetings, Sheila has been complaining that her waiters and waitresses are not responding well to her attempts to encourage them to smile at customers although her recent drive to save electricity by getting staff to turn off unnecessary lights seems to be working. Bert stated that he was not convinced by either of Sheila’s initiatives and he wants her to make sure that food is collected from the kitchen swiftly and so delivered at the right temperature to the customer’s table. Also, Bert has said that he feels that too much food is becoming rotten and having to be thrown out. However, he is not sure what to do about it except make the kitchen staff go through lengthy inventory checks where they review the food held in store. John is worried about these complaints as there is now an air of tension in the owners’ meetings. He has been reading various books about performance management and has come across the quote, ‘What gets measured, gets done.’ He believes this is true but wants to know how it might apply in the case of his business.
Metis Performance Report
Additional notes:
1. The business was founded with $600,000 which comprised $250,000 of equity from the founders and the remainder in a loan from Grand Bank. Under the terms of the loan, all principal is repayable in 10 years’ time and interest is charged at a fixed rate of 8·4% per year.
2. John has estimated the overall cost of capital to be 12·5%.
3. The company earns 4·5% on any returns in its deposit account.
4. John wishes you to use the $600,000 original investment as the capital employed figure for analysis purposes as no new capital has been input and the owners have taken out all residual earnings so far as dividends.
5. The corporation tax rate for Metis is 30%, paid in the same year as profits are generated. Accounting depreciation is a tax allowable cost. 6. Marketing spending is for the short-term promotion of offers only.
Required:
Prepare a report to Mr John Sum addressing the following issues:
(i) Critically assess the existing performance report and suggest improvements to its content and presentation; (12 marks)
(ii) Calculate and briefly evaluate
(a) the use of John’s suggested performance measures and
(b) other profit-based measures, using the most recent year’s actual figures where appropriate as examples; (14 marks)
(iii) Assess how the quote ‘What gets measured, gets done’ could apply to Metis. (10 marks)
Professional marks will be awarded in question 1 for format, style, structure and clarity of the discussion. (4 marks)

15世纪至16世纪法国雕塑的普遍特点是极强的_，这在古戎的作品中得到了最好的体现，他的代表作有法国巴黎圣洁者喷泉浮雕_。

简述文艺复兴时期美术的基本特征。