“80% of the analysis effort for business decisions is spent on data collection and cleansing!” Operations Researcher

Follow the instructions in the below template to practice this critical task — avoid “Garbage in… Garbage out!.”

Hints for completion of outliers portion of assignment:

Outliers are data that are outside the pattern of distribution of data in a range. There are statistical methods to determine outliers in large groups of data in Excel, such as using the Quartile function. However, since the data range in the Week 1 Assignment 2 is relatively small, the easiest way is to view the outliers.

The first step to determine the data range involved is to use a formula to calculate the “Days Late (early)” column on the spreadsheet. You will create a formula to subtract the Promised Delivery Date from the Actual Delivery Date. This will show you the outliers data that are outside the pattern of distribution–data that is too high compared to the rest of the data. You will see that there are 2 outliers. Use the Reference Table to determine what the item name is for each.