ta gathering and reporting. Hanover’s financial analyst would
spend the entire final week of every month collecting spreadsheets from the heads of more
than 50 departments worldwide. She would then consolidate and re-enter all the data into
another spreadsheet, which would serve as the company’s monthly profit-and-loss
statement. If a department needed to update its data after submitting the spreadsheet to
the main office, the analyst had to return the original spreadsheet and wait for the
department to resubmit its data before finally submitting the updated data in the
consolidated document. Assess the impact of this situation on business performance and
management decision making.