Profitability analysis at the product or customer level.
Inventory performance analysis.
Linear & non-linear forecasting.
Seasonal & time series forecasting.
Speaking engagements.
Book Announcement
Numerical Insights is currently writing a book to guide business owners on the value of data analysis within their organization. Below is a snippet for who should read the book.
If you would like to be notified when the book is published, enter your email address below.
"The reader of this book need not be a mathematician. This book is intended for the business-minded individual interested in learning about the strategic advantage which can be obtained from business analytics. Perhaps you would like to reduce your inventory, predict upcoming retirements, determine product and customer profitability or gain insight into customer ordering behaviour.
This book will present some of the simpler approaches to data analysis and will show the value of these analyses to the business. The intent is to show the reader what is possible rather than teaching the mathematical techniques.
The book will present a series of real-world case studies from various functional areas. It will debate the advantages and disadvantages of trying to build these capabilities in-house and will provide a realistic view of the challenges associated with analytics in the corporate world.
CASE STUDY -
Analyzing the Productivity of Your Call Center
This example is dedicated to the study of call center productivity measurements. In this example, I should clarify that this call center is for customer support and not sales. Sales brings a few more variables with it.
Business Question: Should the manager hire more people?
Background: My client runs a call center. One of the division managers is interested in the time spent on the phone by his employees. He has collected the number of phone calls made per day for an average of 20 days on 20 employees. He's wondering if the more experienced employees are more productive. He is especially interested since he is paying them higher salaries. Does he need to add more people to the center or will the productivity rise as the current employees become more experienced?
Analysis: The average number of calls per day for the 20 employees is 28.95. The graph below shows the number of calls for each employee plotted against the number of months they've worked in the call center.
Looking at the plot, it does appear that the number of calls made per day could be related to the number of months on the job. It doesn't look linear though since the number of calls increases more slowly as we move to the right along the graph. This data may be better modeled by a curve other that a straight line. Let's try a quadratic fit. The following graph shows a second order equation of the form:
CALLS = -0.140 + 2.310 MONTHS - 0.04012 MONTHS^2
The R^2(ADJ) = 95.8%
What does this mean in plain English? The results of this equation validate the relationship between experience and productivity. The more experienced employees have likely become more familiar with the phone system and procedures and can now make more calls per day. But, let's get back to our question: Should the Manager hire more people in order to get more calls per day? Looking at the data, he will certainly gain substantial productivity from the employees that have been there less than 15 or 16 months. That represents about 8 dots on the graph and hence 8 employees. He can expect, that with experience, those employees will reach a rate of about 30-32 calls per day. There is the added challenge of retaining his employees. Call centers tend to have a fairly high rate of turnover. Keeping both this and his company's goal for the total number of calls per day, the manager can now make he decision based on the power of information .
Company Information
Location: Germantown, Collierville, Memphis, TN.
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What Other People Say...
“Tracey is a skillful and motivated person. She is an extremely capable team leader equipped to manage projects from cradle to grave. Her communication skills reach all levels of management producing inclusive participation and representation throughout the project. Tracy's insight allows her to see potential area's for improvement and implement new strategies. I would highly recommend Tracey and regard her as a powerful player in the race for bottom line results.”
Rebecca Bauer , Director of Category Management CPFR, VMI, Motorcar Parts of America
Tracey is extremely bright, analytical and adept at coaching a Team of associates from varying functional backgrounds in a Project environment. Her soft skills are excellent and people interactions have always been positive. Tracey was a co-presenter at a BP sponsored Supply Chain Regional Engagement Session conducted at our Corporate Office in New Jersey in 2006 and was received very well by the International Team of BP associates that were in attendance. Tracey thinks strategically with a Business perspective and is excellent at leading teams towards business goals and objectives.
Dan Cadigan , Sr. Strategic Project Leader, BP
Not only did she always work hard and display a good attitude, she also clearly had valuable experience in the world of continuous improvement. I heartily endorse Tracey for jobs in process improvement and reengineering, Lean, Six Sigma, streamlining, and efficiency and quality improvement.”
Tyson Browning , Assistant Prof. of Enterprise Operations, Texas Christian University
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