Predicting Service Delivery Times at the Britt Hunt Company
Instructors can use this incident in multiple ways. First, instructors can use this data for exploratory analysis work in statistics, business spreadsheet and IT personal productivity classes. At this level, students can use the data to develop spreadsheet skills such as descriptive statistics, pivot tables and graphing. Second, instructors in operations management and advanced statistics classes can use this case to develop statistical modeling skills including regression and goodness of fit. In either of these situations, this case is very amendable to team oriented problem solving. Pedagogical research emphasizes the importance of such an approach in business education.
The learning objectives of this critical incident are for students to:
- Analyze a large, “real world” set of operational data using three kinds of statistical analysis:
descriptive, bivariate correlation and multivariate predictive modeling. - Apply statistical methods to determine if data fits a probability distribution.
- Develop and evaluate a prediction model for service times.
- Evaluate the usefulness of available data and suggest additional data that Doug should
collect.