1.4. TO 618: Applied Business Analytics and Decisions

I took one of the most popular classes in Ross, “Applied Business Analytics and Decisions” in Fall term this year. I feel this class literally deserves one of the most popular courses in Ross.

The class objective is to learn how to make strategic and tactical decision on many various problems by using excel and its supportive software such as Power View, Power Pivot, Power Query, Solver, Analytic Solver and so on. A professor taught how to use the software in the class by using many examples, and students had worked on assignments with one or two students almost every week, and one or two teams made a presentation in class as a data consultant. This was something we cannot take away from reading textbooks.

I learned much stuff from this class, but here I will write three points which interested me the most.

• Data Mining tool is very useful in managing the massive amount of data with many common errors. It also classifies and predicts what we want from the data set by using kNN, Logistic Regression, classification trees, naïve Bayes, and so on.
• Analytic Solver® is also a powerful tool as enabling us to use sensitivity, optimization, and simulation analyses as well as to build statistical distribution models easily. This is more than naïve Excel Solver.
• Power Pivot is an excellent add-in tool as it easily connects all of the data like what you want.

Simply saying, naïve Excel solver and functions seem to be enough to make most of the analyses which we need in professional and daily routine work. We do not need to buy any software described above, but the thing that we can utilize both of them is the most important takeaway from the class.