SQIT 3013 COMPUTER IN BUSINESS DECISION MAKING (A)

LECTURER: DR IZWAN NIZAL MOHD SHAHARANEE

ASSIGNMENT 1

PREPARED BY: Muhammad Farouk Bin Zainol Kamal 212310

Define any problem related to your university life. Identify any technology tools/devices to solve your problem. Discuss how you will solve the problems.

I have spent the last three years as an Industrial Statistics undergraduate in Universiti Utara Malaysia. During that span of time, I underwent a lot of subjects that are statistical and mathematical in nature. Courses or subjects that are being offered are usually assessed through two categories; 40% from the final examination and the remaining 60% from a semester-long assessment of courseworks. The coursework marks is mainly contributed by a project or group assignment. In statistical subjects, the assignment usually requires groups to conduct a research, where the students need to extract raw data from real respondents around them. To successfully obtain a natural, unbiased, accurate and random data, researchers need to obtain data from people of the same population in a random manner. It may sound easy, but it isnt. It is only human nature to be bias at some point in the research, and it is most likely to happen at this stage of the research. Getting a random sample is often hard, and takes the longest time in the process of doing the project. Moreover, it is a tedious work, as a simple research might need up to hundreds of sample due to the large population. That is why, as a future statistician, I think it is a problem worth mentioning. After obtaining the data, we then need to analyze it to fulfill our research objectives. This process requires a lot of calculations, and a simple mistake can mean the whole research gone obsolete. Therefore, extreme precautions and a high level of focus and concentration is the key in this stage of the research. However, several decision support systems are handy in overcoming this problem. Almost impossible to get a random and suitable sample for the research by our own, we can use these tools to help us along the way. With help of Microsoft Excel, for example, we can generate random numbers as a guideline in selecting samples randomly from an

obtained sampling frame. From the list of samples, we picked the ones whose number appears randomly in Excel. This allows us to obtain pure and random data from random samples from the population, without being biased. Another way of accomplishing that objective is by using the similar method, except instead of using Microsoft Excel, just simply generate the random numbers by using the scientific calculator. Similarly, a sampling frame is needed beforehand. In addition, statistical softwares such as Microsoft Excel, SPSS, MiniTab, and SAS had been a great help to us in completing our research. Programmed to execute statistical analysis such as ANOVA, Factor Analysis and Discriminant Analysis, tedious and long calculations can be avoided and the accuracy of the calculations were significantly improved. In a matter of seconds, just by a few clicks here and there, outputs and results which will take hours or even days to be calculated manually, can be obtained. Therefore, we can say that the outputs of our findings are much more reliable processed by the software than to do the calculations manually. In my opinion, the innovation of decision support systems like those mentioned above really helped mankind in a number of aspects, such as time and cost. Not only that, it has smaller room for errors and much more accurate.