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Programme Module Assessment title Deadline date Weighting
Pass mark
International Year One / Master’s Foundation Programme
IY1B9 - Quantitative Methods for Business Decision Making
Individual report - Making business decisions using statistical methods
To be confirmed by your tutor
This assessment counts for 40% of your overall grade for this module
40%
*please note your University may require a higher grade for progression.
Assignment summary
For managers to make effective and informed decisions, they employ the use of
statistics to analyse data and information. This allows them to identify risks and
opportunities and help them to make strategic and tactical decisions for the future
of the company.
For example, a company might want to find out about their market share,
profitability of a new product, how many employees should be hired or sacked, what
capital investment is required to increase capacity or reduce costs.
Your coursework is designed to allow you to apply various statistical methods to
real world business problems and improve your decision making skills.
Submission of work
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Important details
Word count File type Font Format Referencing
2,000 words
Word processed/PDF
12 pitch font – Arial or Times New Roman Double spaced and justified
Harvard system
Notes
Your assignment must include page numbers and word count.
You will receive a 10% penalty for this assessment if you go over the word count by
more than 10%. If your assignment is significantly under the word count, you may
not have answered the question in full. This will be reflected in your overall mark
and feedback given by your tutor.
The word count does not include contents, end of text references or appendices.
Module learning outcomes
Upon successful completion of this module, you will be able to:
1. Explain how a variety of sources can be used to collect both primary and
secondary data
relating to a business issue & use critical assessment skills to assess the
suitability of sources
2. Extract the main information from a business data set, produce summaries and
present them
effectively. Synthesise, analyse, display info using ICT and presentation skills
3. Understand and apply a range of quantitative techniques and statistical methods
to analyse
data in a business context (using ICT software where appropriate)
4. Evaluate a business problem to aid decision-making using an evidence base.
This assignment requires you to demonstrate that you can:
1. Create and collect primary and secondary data for a business idea (LO1)
2. Evaluate the effectiveness of sources used when making decisions (LO1)
3. Extract the main information from a data set using representative values;
measures of
dispersion; correlation; probability; simple regression analysis (LO2, LO3)
4. Present data effectively as information to aid decision making (LO2)
5. Apply relevant methods to interpret data, building on the extraction of data
(LO3)
6. Use the information to evaluate a business problem to aid decision making (LO4).
Assignment purpose:
This assignment is designed to test your understanding of, and your practical
ability in using statistical analysis techniques to make decisions through
application to a real business problem. You will be collecting, preparing, testing
and presenting data in order to make management decisions.
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Assignment instructions:
Overview: You are a manager in a business who has a problem to solve. For this
assignment, you need to write a report for other stakeholders in the business to
understand the problem faced and what you believe should be done to solve the
problem.
Scenario:
You should think like a manager in a real business. It is strongly advised that you
use a real-life business scenario to base this coursework upon. If you are unable
to access a real-life business, you can construct a life-like scenario but you must
write the report as if the business is real and as if you are real managers within
this business e.g. a potential start-up, issue in the university or ONCAMPUS.
Any scenario chosen should enable you to access enough data about the context and
problem to allow for data analysis to be performed. Remember this is a business
module and the topic should be business related, however the marks you are awarded
relate to the data collection, analysis and decision making rather than the
scenario. Check with your tutor before you start to ensure that your topic is
suitable.
Note that there are many business problems in different areas (Insurance, Banking,
Finance, Logistics, Economics) that statistical methods can be applied to. These
include, but are not limited to:
1. Marketing and Sales Department – pricing, understanding customer needs, consumer
buying habits, customer segmentation/retention, brand image, advertising
2. Operations Department – product profitability, production, stock management and
quality control
3. Human Resources – hiring, employee motivation, training
4. Investment decisions – equipment purchase, interest rate impact on cost of
borrowing
5. Logistics department – physical distribution by ensuring goods arrive on time
etc
Please note that you are not limited to these sort of business problems.
Content of the report:
1. The problem: define the business context and problem that you need to make a
decision
about as managers in the business.
2. Outline the plan for data collection & analysis
3. Collect and present information/summary statistics and describe the data
demonstrating good
data management and display techniques (see topics 4 & 5 in the scheme of work)
4. Test the data using relevant statistical tests (include your assumptions and
rationale for using
each test) (see topics 6, 7 & 8 in the scheme of work – select relevant tests, you
only need to
use useful and relevant tests on your data)
5. Analyse the results and describe any learning you have gained about the business
problem
through your data analysis
6. Draw conclusions about the data and understand limitations in concluding results
7. Outline and justify your management decision (concerning your business problem)
as a result
of the data analysis you have conducted.
8. References: sources of information and data used in your report (use Harvard
referencing)
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Plagiarism
We expect all submitted work to be your own words (apart from in-text
quotations),