Consultant scores with mathematical modeling.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: QualPro Inc.

It's not necessarily easy to see how advanced mathematical principles could help make printed sales circulars more successful at lower cost. But that's just what happened at Lowe's Inc. and Staples Inc. after they brought in QualPro Inc., a Knoxville, Tenn., firm specializing in what it calls multivarible testing, or MVT[TM] Lowe's, for instance, says it saved more than $50 million in advertising costs in a targeted campaign, while boosting sales.

QualPro (www.qualproinc.com) got its start in 1982 by working with manufacturing companies, says its founder, Dr. Charles Holland. Since that time, it has worked with more than 1,000 companies--many in the Fortune 500 and in all types of industries--and claims an impressive track record in bringing improvements. In fact, Holland said in an interview, if QualPro doesn't think it can generate five times the company's costs for its work in the first year, it won't take on an assignment.

Holland concedes that the mathematics, which uses matrix algebra, is "fairly complex." This allows the effects of each and every variable in a process--up to 20 or 30 or even more--to be studied independently of any other. "The key thing is having balanced and orthogonal matrices" to understand the importance of critical variables, he says. "We can do more classical experimental design after that."

According to QualPro, roughly 53 percent of the ideas and variables it tests don't have a significant impact on a process, 22 percent actually make it worse and about 25 percent improve it. Holland says those numbers have essentially remained the same over the past 16 years, and the company has completed close to 14,000 projects.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Holland has just released a book, Breakthrough Business Results with MVT (John Wiley & Sons, $29.95), which chronicles many of...