Qnt-561 Week 1

Week Four Team Paper xxxxxxxxxxxxxx QNT/561 August 1, 2012 xxxxxxxxx Week 4 Team Paper Best Buy is a company that has 40 years of history with a very accomplished sense of success. In 1966 Best Buy was a small electronics store in that originated in St. Paul Minnesota by Richard Schulze and an acquainted business partner. Considering that technology changes so rapidly, Best Buy has had to transform from just being the little electronics store down the way into a competitive, customer-driven, talent-powered company that emphasizes on pleasing the customers as it pertains to the life of technology.In 1993 Best Buy was recognized as the nation’s second largest electronics retailer and was recognized by Forbes in 2004 as the â€Å"Company of the Year. † However, in 2012 Best Buy had a huge layoff which resulted into 50 store closings. The competitors for Best buy include online stores like Amazon, Buy. com, Tiger direct and various others. Purpose Best Buy stores are locate d throughout the United States and every year additional employees are hired to help staff during the holiday season (known as seasonal staffing and typically runs during holiday season).Higher head count is inefficient and expensive. This poses an organizational dilemma; can sales data be used to identify the appropriate number of temporary employees that need to be hired during the holiday season? Considering the sheer amount of stores that require temporary staffing data will be collected from all its stores and used to identify the staffing needs. Research Design Give the nature of business of Best Buy Quantitative research should be applied. It involves gathering data and then organizes, tabulates, depicts, and describes the data collection (Glass & Hopkins, 1984).The dependent variable that will be looked at is staffing levels. A dependent variable is one that â€Å"is measured, predicted, or otherwise monitored and expected to affected by manipulation of an independent varia ble† (Cooper & Schindler 2011). Because this data will only be measured once, products sold and staffing levels, a descriptive quantitative design will be utilized. â€Å"For an accurate estimate of the relationship between variables, a descriptive study usually needs a sample of hundreds or even thousands of subjects† (The Association for Educational Communications and Technology).The estimate of the relationship is less likely to be biased if you have a high participation rate in a sample selected randomly from a population. Operational Definitions Operational Definitions Variable Definition Data of Interest #1 The number of products sold during the Holiday Season How will it be measured #1 If the product was sold between November 15 and January 5 Data of Interest #2 Number of temporary employees during the Holiday Season How will it be measured #2 If a temporary employee was active after November 15 and inactive after January 15 Sample Data Collection DesignsThere ar e various methods of collecting data such that the information collected can be used to draw inferences about the target population. The sales forecast is the key component for the problem statement and for accuracy it is important to know what consumers prefer over Best Buy. Participation in business surveys is usually voluntary and the quality of the results depends crucially on the willingness of enterprises to co-operate. A promising approach to getting high response rates is to make compliance as painless as possible through good questionnaire design and rotation of respondents.It is also important that the enterprises included in the survey should be convinced that the information they provide will be useful to the enterprises themselves in addition to any use it may have for macro-economic analysis. Conclusion Because the human mind cannot extract the full import of a large mass of raw data, descriptive statistics are very important in reducing the data to manageable form. Wh en in-depth, narrative descriptions of small numbers of cases are involved, the research uses description as a tool to organize data into patterns that emerge during analysis.Those patterns aid the mind in comprehending a qualitative study and its implications. References Cooper, D. R. & Schindler, P. S. (2011). Business research methods (11th ed. ). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin. The Association for Educational Communications and Technology U. S. Department of Education Retrieved July 29, 2012 http://pr. bby. com/phoenix. zhtml? c=244152&p=irol-factsheet Retrieved July 29, 2012 http://www. startribune. com/business/157988175. html? refer=y Business Tendency Survey handbook