Why Business Statistics Matter
Throughout the world, every minute of every day, decisions are made by businesses that will determine if they will become profitable, stagnate or get eliminated by the competition.
Good Decision-Making
Good decisions, ones that help a business become profitable and sustaining are usually made with assistance from information gathered about the market in which the business operates. This includes intel about economic and financial environments, the workforce, the competition and emerging trends that could impact normative business operations. This kind of information usually comes in the form of data that is then converted into statistics.
Business Statistics Language
Business statistics, like many areas of study, has its own language. For the most part, business statistics is a science that deals with the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of numerical data.
Descriptive Statistics
If a business analyst is using data gathered on a group to describe or reach conclusions about that same group, the statistics are called descriptive statistics.
Professors tend to like descriptive statistics because they help summarize a class’s exam results. These results can then be used to draw conclusions about that specific classroom of students.
Inferential Statistics
If a researcher gathers data from a sample and uses the statistics generated to reach conclusions about the population from which the sample was taken, the statistics are inferential statistics.
Pharmaceutical companies often use inferential statistics when producing new drugs for the marketplace. New drugs are expensive to make so sample sizes in testing tend to be small. Utilizing inferential statistics researchers can design pharmaceutical experiments using small randomly selected samples of patients and attempt to reach conclusions and make inferences about the population.
Business Statistics for Your Business
Business statistics provide tools for collecting data which are then analyzed and summarized. Once synthesized into either descriptive or inferential data points information can be presented to decision-makers. Without question, business statistics will continue to play an important role in the daily decision-making of viable business entities around the world.
Elaine Allan, BA. MBA
Technology & Business Blogger