You are a project managerfor your company. Your boss, the Vice President of Operations, assigned you a task at the beginning of the year. You must provide a recommendation for reducing costs in your department's operations by 20% in accordance with the company's goals for the new year. Your boss has asked you to identify the roles and skills of people who should be members of your team to assist in the steps to craft this recommendation. You sent a memo to your boss with the proposed tasks, team, and milestones.

You are provided a dataset for this assignment. This Big Data Excel dataset contains all of the costs that your department incurred last year, with a breakdown by area within your department, month by month. You are also provided some numbers of aspects that make up the costs; in other words, errors and the costs to correct the errors, as well as costs for operations and administrative costs.

For this assignment, you must "eyeball" the data to continue the task assigned by your boss. (You will complete the formal SAS analysis in the IP assignment.) Act as though you are calling a project meeting with the team of business analysts, Six Sigma specialists, and department representatives who will help you with the data analysis. In this Discussion Board, you must provide your hypothesis of 2 possible opportunities that you have identified to reduce costs. You must research "Operations Cost Reduction Opportunities" in the CTU library, in SAS, and on the Internet and provide references and the practical examples of the cost-reduction opportunities of similar companies, perhaps from an industry similar to your chosen industry (you have chosen a company and industry for the completion of the assignments in this course session).

In your Discussion Board response, you must provide enough information to solicit meaningful feedback from your teammates (i.e., feedback from your classmates). You must provide the following:

• Company name (existing company)
• Industry
• Type of operations and problems you have observed in the dataset
• 2 suggested cost-reduction ideas and real-life examples
• References