INTRODUCTION TO BMGT 220 BUSINESS STATISTICS 2

Decisions are made by businesses around the world every minute of the working day. The
decisions determine whether companies will be profitable and growing or whether they will
stagnate and collapse. Most decisions are made with the assistance of information gathered in the
market place, the economic and financial environment, the work force, the competition and so
forth. The information is usually in the form of data or is accompanied by data. Business
Statistics provides the tool through which such data are collected, analyzed, summarized and
presented to facilitate the decision-making process within the dynamic world of business.

Examples of Statistics in Business

 According to the Talent Report of 15th March 2016, the Unemployment rate among youth
aged 18-19 years is 25% and those aged 20-24 years is 24%. The overall unemployment
rate among the working age group is 12.7%
Discuss usefulness of such information to various interested groups e.g. GoK, Recruitment
agencies etc.
 Ranking of the 8 Least Popular Job Industries in Kenya
1. Engineering and Construction
2. Mining and Natural Resources
3. Legal
4. Strategy and Consultancy
5. Trade and Services
5. Health and Pharmaceutical
7. Education and Training
8. Government
Discuss to whom this information is relevant.
 Highest level of Education of Job seekers
*Bachelors 48%
*Diploma 33%
*Certificate 11%
*Masters 8%
 Salary Expectations of Job seekers with a Bachelors Degree
<30000 45%
30001-75000 30%
75001-150000 11%
150001-300000 6%
300001-450000 4%
450001-600000 2%
above 600000 2%
 Go to Kenya National Bureau of Statistics website for Kenya Data published by the
Ministry of Planning and National Development and the Central Bureau of Statistics.
You will mainly Socio-Economic data e.g. % of population with access to safe drinking
water; % of Kenya population with access to maternal health services (Consider Mrs UK
Beyond Zero Campaign); Population growth rate;
  Household Economic Surveys
 Shoppers Surveys to see spending habits and study consumer behaviour
 KABU – Life After College Survey—how many get jobs after 1yr? 2yrs? 3yrs?
 Nakuru Statistics …for investment in business e.g. Hotels & Restaurants, Schools,
Hostels, Salons, eateries, Transport etc

Review
 In BMGT 210 –Business Statistics I, you examined several ways of depicting, arranging
or structuring data into meaningful and useful forms for effective application and
interpretation by decision makers using pie charts, bar charts, histograms, stem-leaf
diagrams, box-whisker plots, ogives, frequency polygons etc
 You also discussed how to describe data using:
**Measures of central tendency such as the mean, mode, median, quartiles and
percentiles
**Measures of variability such as the range, interquartile range, mean absolute
deviation, variance and standard deviation
**Measures of shape e.g. skewness and kurtosis

In this course BMGT 220 Business Statistics II, we will develop the concepts further applying
them to probability distributions functions which are categorized as :
 Discrete Probability Distributions functions e.g. Binomial distribution, Poisson
distribution and Hyper-geometric distribution
 Continuous Probability distributions functions e.g. the Normal (Gaussian) distribution,
the Normal distribution as an approximation for the Binomial distribution and the Normal
distribution as an approximation for the Poisson distribution.