Anybody in the corporate world knows fads come and go. We had Generic Management, then Total Quality Management many years ago based on Demming principals, then there was High Performance Organization, Lean Six Sigma, and now the rage is Design of Experiments using statistics.. Unlike the others, I don't think this one is going away. The example DOE people use is taking all the variables, including cost to sell a bag of popcorn. Then using the data from who buys the most of what, the manufacturer can optimize the variables of package color, size, kernel size, taste, salt, etc. to produce the most marketable product. Sometimes we get a DOE guy assigned to something we don't have a problem with, but after he figures out a way to set up a model, he actually improves our process, sometimes dramatically. In this case, I think they hired the guy and he is not sure exactly what to model, but he will figure it out and it will hopefully help somethings on the team.