One way to improve a process is to eliminate non€“value-added activities (e.g., extra movements) and wasted effort (e.g., looking for materials).

A consultant was hired to improve the efficiency in a large shop floor operation. She tested three different workspace designs and two different storage/retrieval systems. She measured process flow time for three randomly selected operations through each of the combinations of workspace design and storage/retrieval systems. The data and two-way ANOVA results are shown here.
a) Is this an experiment or observational study? Explain.
b) What is the response variable?
c) How many treatments are involved?
d) Based on the two-way ANOVA results, management concludes that neither the workspace design nor the storage/retrieval system impacts process flow time (and that the consultant wasn€™t worth the money). Do you agree with this conclusion? Explain.

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Workspace Storage Flow Time Design System(Days) 4.5 3.0 3.0 3.2 4.5 3.5 3.2 2.8 3.0 3.8 3.6 4.0 3.0 4.0 4.2 4.2 3.0 3.6 Sum of Mean Source DF Squares Square F-ratio P-value Workspace Design Storage System 2 0.30867 0.15433 1.56 0.230 1 0.07500 0.07500 0.76 0.392 Interaction 2 4.87800 2.43900 24.72 0.0001 Error Total 24 2.36800 0.09867 29 7.62967