Sara Hughes, the CFO at Sports Equipment, Inc. (SEI), is striving to make financial analysis more easily and uniformly done by the company's investment center managers. As such, she has presented her boss COO George Noland with a pair of tabular tools for deconstructing profit variances into three component parts. Those three parts pertain to the variance amounts due to: (1) utilizing more net assets (NA), (2) achieving higher margins on those NAs, and (3) the interaction effect of these first two factors. Hughes has walked Noland through an example of using the tools, and he is now taking some time to verify his own understanding of the tools by working through four additional examples. Hughes is hopeful that Noland will find the tools conveniently useful, and thus will give Hughes permission to distribute and explain the tools to the operations investment center managers. In addition, Noland has envisioned some additional, typical two-factor variance analysis situations where the tools might also be applicable—he wants to think a bit more about those possibilities.