Stave & Char Cooperage

What you have been asked to do

Stave & Char makes bourbon barrels for distilleries, wine barrels for wineries, and decorative barrels for the retail trade. Every barrel passes through one firing house. You are the divisional manager's analyst, and over the coming weeks you will answer four questions in order: what volume this business needs to survive, what to do with the station capacity you have, whether to buy more of it, and — a year on — whether that was the right call.

The file gives you what is written down. Some of what matters is not written down anywhere, and the people who know it will answer exactly the question you ask them.

• Your figures are your own. Nobody else in your section has the same file, and a walkthrough of someone else's numbers will give you the wrong answer.
• Permanent. Each stage locks when you say so. Locking is what opens the next stage's evidence, and a locked stage cannot be edited or reopened — not by you, and not on request.
• Budgeted. Three people at the cooperage will answer questions, and asking costs credits from a budget of 10 for the whole case. It will not stretch to every question, so you will have to decide who is worth asking before you know what they will say. A credit spent is spent.
• Capped. Getting a figure wrong never blocks you. Each checked item gives you two checks that say what kind of thing is off, never the figure; after the second, the button stops answering and you keep going.
• Changing your conclusion when the evidence changes counts in your favour. Holding a conclusion that was right counts exactly the same.

Graded. 100 points, all of them from the case. 87 are marked by the platform the moment your instructor opens your submission: your figures against your own file, and 3 of them for the record of how you worked — every stage locked, the log fetched before you named a capacity, a fact bought before the decision that needed it. 13 are four short pieces of writing a person reads beside your figures. There is no oral component. The rubric your instructor uses is published, and says what full, half and no credit look like on each piece of writing.

If your section runs only the first two stages, the later items are not expected of you and you are marked out of what your section was asked to do.

Nothing in this case can tell whether the numbers you type were computed by you. The figures all cross-check each other, so a tool that is told which document to read will get most of them right without knowing why they are right — and it will never ask a question it does not know it needs to ask. What the case can see, and what your instructor reads first, is whether you obtained the facts before you used them: whether you fetched the log before you named a capacity, asked before you priced the lease, and locked a conclusion before the evidence against it existed. That record is marked, and it and the four pieces of writing are the parts nothing else can produce for you.