You are an operations manager for a local steel manufacturing company, and you are in the process of selecting a vendor for a new type of metal finishing machine. for the past week you’ve tested machines from three different companies and collected the randomly sampled data below that shows how many parts each machine produced in seven different one-hour periods over the course of your manufacturing test. is the average production of these machines the same, or is one of them different from the others? [if the productivity is the same, you will simply choose the machine with the lowest cost.] you may assume that all populations are independent and nearly normal. test at the 98% confidence level.

You have $22,000 to invest in a stock portfolio. your choices are stock x with an expected return of 11 percent and stock y with an expected return of 13 percent. if your goal is to create a portfolio with an expected return of 11.74 percent, how much money will you invest in stock x? in stock y?

You are the manager of the packaging department in a cookie factory. (obviously, the packaging employees cannot eat the cookies that are transferred in during the period.) after your employees insert cookies into colorful packages (step 1) for display on store shelves, the packages of cookies are then boxed using cardboard cartons (step 2) for shipment to stores. each unit of product is represented by a carton of packaged cookies. the packaging department began the period with 1,000 units of cookies. during the period, 5,000 units of cookies were transferred in from the baking department and 5,500 units of cookies were transferred out to the finished goods department. the number of units of cookies in the ending inventory of the packaging department equals:

When randy, a general manager of a national retailer, moved to a different store in his company that was having difficulty, he knew that sales were low and after talking to his employees, he found morale was also low. at first randy thought attitudes were poor due to low sales, but after working closely with employees, he realized that the poor attitudes were actually the cause of poor sales. randy was able to discover the cause of the problem by utilizing skills.