How can you use statistics to support decision making in a manufacturing environment?

  1. How can you use statistics to support decision making in a manufacturing environment?
  2. How does statistics convert raw numbers (raw data) into information?
  3. Consider tables, graphs, histograms, box plots, which one is more effective at bringing clarity to the information contained in the data?
  4. What is an example of a decision made by the airline industry that was based on inferential statistics?
  5. How do we know if the data is accurate?

 

  1. Management of a retail chain has been tracking the growth of sales, regressing the company’s sales versus the number of outlets. Their data are weekly, spanning the last 65 weeks, since the chain opened its first outlets. What lurking variable might introduce dependence into the errors of the SRM?

 

  1. Supervisors of an assembly line track the output of the plant. One tool that they use is a simple regression of the count of packages shipped each day versus the number of employees who were active on the assembly line during that day, which varies from 35 to about 50. Identify a lurking variable that might violate one of the assumptions of the SRM.