Applied Statistics on Business at Spain: A Case of Statistical Engineering

• Activity Number: 656
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 2, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Quality and Productivity Section
• Author(s): Igor Barahona*+ and Alex Riba
• Companies: Technical University of Catalonia/BarcelonaTech and Technical University of Catalonia/BarcelonaTech
• Keywords: Ranking ; Statistical Thinking ; Quality Improvement ; Analytics ; Spain

Abstract

Applied Statistics on Business Management (ASBM) is defined as the extensive use of data, information and mathematical models to predict trends and behaviours, reduce risks and make better decisions. In order to measure and quantify ASBM's degree of use, a five level scale is introduced. That scale is an integration of five key drivers (KD's): Competitive Advantage, Management Support, Systematic Thinking, Data Exploitation and Statistical Techniques Inventory. The pattern is: The better at the key drivers, the higher at the scale. At first, a questionnaire was designed and its reliability was calculated. It was sent to a sample of 6000 companies at Catalonia, Spain, and we received 255 responses. Seven statistical techniques were used to extract relevant information about ASBM in Catalonia. Among them, Regression Analysis was used to identify the most important KD, Principal Component Analysis to understand similarities between companies and Factorial Analysis to understand relationships between KD's. This sequential integration of statistical methods, concepts, tools and information technology is a documented example of statistical engineering applied in real-world problems.