Book excerpt: If you're seeking to master business analytics, case studies offer invaluable help: they expose you to the entire decision-making process, helping you practice an active role in both performing analysis and using its output to recommend optimal decisions. Now, drawing on his extensive teaching and consulting experience, Prof. Matthew Drake has created the ideal new casebook for all analytics students and practitioners. Drake, author of the widely-praised Applied Business Analytics Casebook, now presents a collection of up-to-date cases that are longer and more detailed than those typically presented in undergraduate texts, but concise and focused enough to be taught in a single classroom session. Organized by analytical technique, Advances in Business, Operations, and Product Analytics covers: Descriptive analytics: descriptive statistics, sampling/inferential statistics, statistical quality control, and probability Predictive analytics: forecasting, demand managing, data and text mining Prescriptive analytics: optimization-based modeling, simulation-based modeling, decision analysis, and multi-criteria decision making Industry-specific analytics: HR and managerial analytics, financial analytics, and healthcare/life sciences In addition to practitioners, this casebook will be especially valuable to students and faculty in undergraduate and masters' courses that cover topics in business analytics, and courses applying analytics to specific industries such as healthcare, or specific business functions such as marketing.