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Question: Nearly everyone has eaten at McDonald’s;


Nearly everyone has eaten at McDonald’s; the company sells millions of French fries each day. However, variation in the fries hasn’t gone unnoticed. One Japanese news source challenged McDonald’s Japanese weight standard with an experiment. Weighing 6500 grams of fries from 20 orders of large fries, it was concluded that the average order contained 10 grams less than the standard of 170 grams per large order.11 In New Zealand, multiple small-scale experiments were completed to determine value versus cost of upgrading order sizes. Averages of 12 fries and 13 grams were the only differences found between the medium and large orders, and for the price upgrade, it was concluded that it wasn’t worth the cost.12 To study variation in French fry lengths and cosmetic qualities, one student, Maggie Daly, measured 868 French fries, obtained from two small, medium, and large orders at two different McDonald’s locations in Cincinnati, Ohio. Length measurements were recorded in centimeters. She also rated each fry on six cosmetic attributes: brown color or spots, broken or cracked, a piece of a whole fry, burnt potato skin on the fry, transparency (lack of crispness), and wilted texture. If a fry exhibited at least one of these, it was deemed nonconforming. The data are given in the Excel file C06 Maggie’s’ French Fry Study Case Data on the Student Companion Site.

Discussion Questions:
1. Use statistical tools discussed in this chapter to analyze the data. Consider the overall distribution of lengths, statistical summary of the data, percentage of conforming fries, and differences by location. You might also compute confidence intervals and conduct a hypothesis test to determine if differences exist by location.
2. Summarize your results in a well-written report.


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> In a true story related by our colleague Professor James W. Dean, Jr., the general manager of an elevator company was frustrated with the lack of cooperation between the mechanical engineers who designed new elevators and the manufacturing engineers who

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> A team was formed to study the refrigerator part at Cool Food, Inc. described in Problem 6. While continuing to work to find the root cause of scrap, they found a way to reduce the scrap cost to $35 per part. a. Determine the Taguchi loss function for t

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> An electronic component in a satellite radio made by Space scope, Inc. has a failure rate of λ = 0.0000165 units/hour. Find the mean time to failure (MTTF). What is the probability (assuming an exponential probability distribution) that the component wil

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> At Elproparts Manufacturers’ integrated circuit business, managers gathered data from a customer focus group and found that any output voltage that exceeds 60 6 3.5 volts was unacceptable to the customer. Exceeding these limits results in an estimated lo

> A computer chip designed by the MicroKeeb Co. has a specification for the distance between two adjacent pins of 2.000 6 0.002 mm. The loss due to a defective chip is $4. A sample of 25 chips was drawn from the production process and the results, in milli

> A computer chip designed by the MicroKeeb Co. has a specification for the distance between two adjacent pins of 2.000 6 0.002 mm. The loss due to a defective chip is $4. A sample of 25 chips was drawn from the production process and the results, in milli

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> Choose a product or service to illustrate how several definitions of quality can apply simulate

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2.99

See Answer