How can the weekly sales of a financial services company be related to
its press and advertising budget? Students are invited to investigate
this with the aid of regression models. The material is suitable for
students who already have some knowledge of regression and MINITAB,
e.g. second or third year undergraduates in Business Studies. Emphasis
is placed on the modelling cycle and particularly on model validation.
A log file is compiled including text from screens, MINITAB screen
shots and the students' own notes. This could form the basis of
assessed work. All screen and text data is read from external plain
text files and the program is therefore customisable by the tutor.
Minitab Release 6 or 8 is required for this module.
In the following modules, a large pharmaceutical company has a number of
problems to which solutions are being sought.
Issues of pollution control in the Company raise problems of simple
probability distributions modelling. This material is suitable for
students who already have some knowledge of probability distributions
and simple MINITAB commands, e.g. first year undergraduates in Business
Studies. Problems may be selected from a menu of six as directed by the
tutor. Distributions include Binomial, Poisson and Normal. Emphasis
is on the process of modelling rather than on a tutorial in
probability. A log file is compiled including text from screens,
MINITAB screen shots and the students' own notes. This could form the
basis of assessed work.
Minitab Release 6 or 8 is required for this module.
The Company is planning to launch a new product. Before spending on
research and market testing they require a pre-market test survey of
likely buyer reaction to the product. A large demographic database
will be used as population from which the student will have to select a
suitable sample and summarise the results. The sampling methods covered
will be SRS, Quota and Cluster.
At the end of each financial year, the financial subsidiary of the
Company has to make an assessment of the liability of the company for
unsettled insurance claims. There are thousands of small claims
through to fewer than ten extremely large claims. A database of
outstanding claims will be available to the student from which to
select samples. Sampling methods will be SRS and Stratified (fixed,
proportional and optimal).
The Company is located next to a river and is considering introducing a
new product. The student is lead through an exploration of data sets
that include expenditure on advertising, research and development and
costs of pollution. Exploratory data analysis techniques such as stem
and leaf, box and whisker and dot plots are used and lead to
consideration of wider issues. On completion, the student will have
identified important features of single sample data sets.
The Company wish to include information on the biological effect of
pollution in their dissemination of the new product launch. The student
is led through a comparison of related data sets using simple
extensions of exploratory data analysis techniques applied in the
previous module. On completion, the student will be able to compare
important features between two or more data sets.
The Company uses several different suppliers of raw materials and wishes
to assess the effect of supplier, if any, on production rate and
product quality. Data for production under a range of conditions,
(e.g. operator, line, equipment) with different suppliers is available
and one and two factor ANOVA are use to address this problem.
The Company employs a number of skilled and unskilled workers who are
paid weekly. This same company also employs a number of salaried
workers (paid annually). Students are invited to detect any
discrimination between these different groups and also detect if there
is any sex discrimination within them.
Failure in equipment is an inevitable problem in manufacturing and a
pharmaceutical company is no exception. The student is concerned with
finding an effective probability distribution to represent these.
Various alternatives (e.g. the Weibull and Gumbel) are considered.
Beforehand, the student is given a backdrop to the problem by
introducing hazard rates, censored and uncensored data, age and
non-age-related failures etc.
The Company has recently received complaints from a number of customers
about products supplied to them being under weight. A set of process
control data is available based on an existing quality management
scheme. Two further datasets are provided in respect of alternative
schemes carried out elsewhere. What inferences can be drawn for the
schemes? Analysis relies on the use of control charts, capability
indices etc.
