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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.