Week 1

Introduction

1. Transportation Planning. An analytics professional is asked to plan the shipment of a product for the next quarter. She employs the following process:

a. For each of the 12 distribution centers, she plots the quarterly demand for the product over the last three years.

b. Based on the plot for each distribution center, she develops a forecasting model to forecast demand for next quarter for each distribution center.

c. She takes the forecast for next quarter for each distribution center and inputs those forecasts, along with the capacities of the company’s four factories and transportation rates from each factory to each distribution center, into an optimization model. The optimization model suggests a shipping plan that minimizes the cost of how to satisfy the forecasted demand from the company's four different factories to the distribution centers.

Describe the type of analytics being utilized in each of the three steps outlined above.

2. Comparing Smartwatches. Consumer Reports provides product evaluations for its subscribers. The following table shows data from Consumer Reports for five smartwatches on the following characteristics:

Overall Score—a score awarded for a variety of performance factors

Price—the retail price

Recommended—does Consumer Reports recommend purchasing the smartwatch based on performance and strengths?

Best Buy—if Consumer Reports recommends purchasing the smartwatch, does it also consider it a “best buy” based on a blend of performance and value?

For each of the four pieces of data, indicate whether the data are quantitative or categorical and whether the data are cross-sectional or time series.

Make	Overall Score	Recommended	Best Buy	Price
Apple Watch Series 5	84	Yes	No	$395
Fitbit Versa 2	78	Yes	Yes	$200
Garmin Venu	77	Yes	No	$350
Fitbit Versa Lite	65	No	No	$100

3. Chemical Process Control.

The following chart is a quality control chart of the temperature of a chemical manufacturing process. What observations can you make about the process?