A. Summarize the real-word business situation you identified
In the restaurant industry labor is one of the greatest controllable overhead cost. In order to be profitable in this industry manager must be able to plan for sales and know when to have staff in the restaurant. While many theories exist on staffing a new trend is arising that states that managers should staff for the sales that they would like to have not the sales that they currently have. The theory behind this is that with more staff on guest will be taken care of more efficiently there for reducing their visit time. The quicker that the guest are in and out the more guest the restaurant will be have to serve in a single day. The easiest way to determine the amount of labor used in a restaurant is to look at the total number of labor hours used for the day. This method is effective because it takes out the variances pay scale for each employee. If labor was judged on dollars a manager would be more likely to staff the “cheaper” employees or run with a smaller number of “expensive” employees. By looking at the data I would like to determine if this theory is in fact correct and if sales increase as the restaurants labor hours increase.
B. Report the data you collected, relevant to the business situation, by doing the following. 1. Describe the relevant data you collected To study the relationship I had to collect two different data point. The first set of that I collected was the daily sales for the restaurant. I decided to collect the sales for entire month so that I received an equal mix of days of the week. Sales in a restaurant vary drastically from day to day. To collect this data I had to log into the back office computer and run the store performance report of the entire period that I was analyzing. The next set of data that I collected was the labor hours used each day corresponding with the correct day’s sales. Like sales labor can vary from day to day within the restaurant. Some factors that can affect labor could be different flows of sales than expected, different employee performance levels, and different employee wages. In order to standardize the differences I decided to look at the over hours used per day rather than the total labor dollars.
2. Create a graphical display

3. Discuss one advantage and one disadvantage of the data gathering methodology you used to collect data. One of the advantages to the data that I collected was that systems were already in place to calculate the data that I needed. This information could also be considered accurate because it is the same information that the company uses when creating their financial reports. Since restaurants track sales and labor on a daily basis I simply had to access the appropriate reports and chart the information. The ease of access of this information greatly reduced the time that it took access the information. One disadvantage that I experienced involved the collection of the labor data. While I had access to all the reports that I needed the daily hours were broken down into each individual positions within the restaurant. In order to calculate the total hours for the day I had to manually add up the hours used in each individual position. In addition to this I also ran into problems with getting the information quickly. I was not able to run a report that could show me all of the information at once so I had to run an individual report for each day that appeared on the graph. This process became very time consuming and laborism.
C. Report how you analyzed the data using an appropriate analysis technique (e.g., linear programming, crossover analysis, t-test, regression) by doing the following:

1. Describe the analysis technique you used to appropriately analyze the data. I decided to use linear regression as my analyze technique when looking at my data. Linear regression takes two different variables and plots them on a standard x-y graph. Once the data has