Case Study Assignment

THE NEVADA GAMING CASE

The manufacturing division of Nevada gaming employs 800 assembly line workers who are regularly rated on their job performance in building the video machines. Its IT Department has made the recommendation to equip each of its assembly line employees with a special hand-held computer to automatically capture production data. These hand-held computers were tested for one month with 36 randomly selected employees. Their performance ratings with and without the computers are shown in Table 1. The company estimates that each point increase in a performance rating reduces costs by 10 cents per hour per employee due to the increased efficiency. Each employee works 40 hours a week. The computers will cost 30 cents per hour per worker to procure and maintain. Nevada Gaming doesn’t want to acquire these computers unless it can be 95% confident that the economic benefit from increased productivity will exceed the additional cost of the computers.

The company feels that older workers perform significantly better than the younger workers. But the company is not sure. If this is statistically supported, the company is willing to offer a voluntary training course to those who can benefit from it.

Your task is to prepare a consultant’s report of about five pages. You will be graded according to the following three criteria: a) Recognition of the statistical problems in the case, b) Ability to analyze raw data using appropriate statistical methods and computer tools, c) Interpretation/explanation of the results of the analysis to management, and overall quality of writing, organization, and presentation of the report.

Instructions for preparing the report

Your task is to prepare a typewritten, professional looking consultant’s report of about five pages . The overall purpose of the report is to provide you with the opportunity to explain in words some of what you have learned about statistics this semester.

Your report should have the following sections:

1. A paragraph outlining the statistical problems in the case study and which statistical techniques you learned in the course you will use in solving them.
2. a) Briefly discuss what descriptive statistics is.
   b) Use your knowledge of descriptive statistics to explain the sample results for
   1. gender, (include pie-chart)
   2. age, (include histogram)
   3. performance rating with the hand-held computers (include histogram)

c) Briefly discuss what Statistical Estimation is.

d) Find the mean difference (increase or decrease) in performance rating after the hand-held computers were introduced. Determine its 95% confidence. Embed appropriate Excel screenshots within the report. Interpret what they mean in plain English. Should the company buy the hand-held computers based on their effect on the performance rating? Explain your reasoning. Show the math clearly in steps.

4. a) Briefly discuss what hypothesis testing is.

b) State the Null and Alternate hypotheses assuming the hand-held computers would make an improvement in the company's operations.

c) Perform a Paired t-test using Excel. Embed appropriate screenshots into your report. Interpret the results in plain English. Explain why you would reject or not reject the null hypothesis.

d) If the 800 assembly line employees work 40 hours per week, estimate the expected net $ savings/loss per week for the company. Show your step by step calculations.

e) Provide a 95% confidence interval for the net $ savings/loss.

(Note: Since these machines will cost 30 cents per employee per hour to acquire and maintain and the benefit is 10 cents per hour per point increase in job performance rating, the computers will have to increase worker productivity by an average of more than three points per employee (30 cents cost / 10 cents per point benefit = 3 points) to be a cost effective choice).

5. Briefly describe what Regression is. Is the performance with computers predictable based on age? Should we start a training program?

6. Your paper should have a short conclusion paragraph with recommendations.

Embed all Excel outputs into the report and do not attach extraneous printouts. Explain what the Excel results mean in words; simply repeating the numbers without explanation is not sufficient.

Price: $11.62

Solution: The downloadable solution consists of 6 pages, 562 words and 3 charts.
Deliverable: Word Document