You’ve set aside Sunday afternoon to bake some cookies, but you discover you have run out of eggs. Your partner in marital bliss has gone out and taken the car. You call a couple of mates, and they tell you to try bananas, vegetable oil, or applesauce as egg substitutes. You decide to have some fun and mix it up on a few batches to see what’s best. Woohoo, you’re on the road to design of experiments (DOE).

Transpose the above to a business situation, and you have a food technologist in a research laboratory. He has plenty of eggs, but he wants to cut the cost of using them. He doesn’t have any mates to call, but he has thousands of options such as mangoes, guava, and mashed potatoes instead of the banana; olive oil, peanut oil, sesame oil, and many others. He needs some way of measuring things. DOE gives a structured way to do experiments with a great number of known variables, by adjusting the many known factors in groups, with the minimum number of trials. It gives some clever sums to tell him which is best, with what interactions.

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