Question

Customer orders at a department store. A department store receives customer orders through its call center and website. These orders, as well as any special orders received in the stores are forwarded to a distribution center where workers pull the items on the orders from inventory, pack them, and prepare the necessary paperwork for the shipping company that will pick up the packages and deliver them to the customers. In order to monitor the subprocess of pulling the items from inventory, one order is checked every 15 minutes to determine whether the worker has pulled the correct item.

a. Identify the process of interest.

b. Identify the variable of interest. Is it quantitative or qualitative?

c. Describe the sample.

d. Describe the inference of interest.

e. How likely is the sample to be representative?

Short answer

a. Taking care of the orders of the customers from the time that the store is receiving an order to providing it to the shipping company.

b. The variable is that the worker has pulled the item correctly; qualitative.

c. The group of all orders that are verified every 15 minutes

d. The number of all orders that are pulled correctly or incorrectly

e. Quite likely

Step-by-step solution

Identifying the process of interest

The processof interest represents the procedure that is useful for the researcher here; it isfulfilling the orders.All the steps included in the method of providing the orders, beginning from getting the order, are then sent to the distribution center. Then workers prepare the order and provide it to the shipping company.

Determining the variable of interest and specifying whether it is qualitative or quantitative

The variable or the altering element in this population is whetherthe worker has correctly pulled out the order or not. Thispulling out of order correctly or incorrectly is non-numeric; moreover demonstrates the quality; hence it is a qualitative variable.

Indicating the sample

The sample is a batch extracted from the population. In this case, it is thebatch of all orders inspected after 15 minutes.

Specifying the inference of interest

The inferences represent the procedure to analyze data to understand the properties of the population. In this case, it isthe total number of all the orders pulled by the workers, whether these orders are drawn correctly or not.

Demonstrating that the sample is representative.

One order is reviewed every 15 minutes; hence the order is picked up randomly. When the items are selected randomly from the population, each item can be picked and inspected; thus, it isquite likely that the sample is a representative sample.