Sonichi Electronics manufactures small electronic consumer items such as portable clocks, calculators, and radios. The company is concerned about the high cost of its product-inspection operation. As a result, it had its industrial engineering department conduct a time study of an inspector who inspects portable radios.
The operation consists of seven elements, as follows:
(1) The package is opened and the radio is removed;
(2) The battery casing cover is removed;
(3) Two AA batteries are inserted;
(4) The radio is turned on, and the inspector tunes to a station and listens briefly to at least two stations;
(5) The radio is turned off and the batteries are removed;
(6) The battery cover is replaced;
(7) The radio is repackaged.
The time-study observations (in minutes) for 10 cycles are shown in the following table.

a. The allowance factor for this job is 15%. Determine the standard time.
b. If management wants the estimate of the average cycle time to be within ±0.03 minute with a 95% level of confidence, how many job cycles should be observed?
c. Management is considering putting inspectors on a piece-rate wage system in order to provide them with greater incentive to inspect more items. What effect might this have on the quality-inspectionfunction?

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Elemental Times Element 1 35 6 7 89 10 RF 10.23 0.20 0.19 0.20 0.18 0.18 0.24 0.25 0.17 0.20 1.05 2 0.12 0.10 0.08 0.09 0.10 0.10 0.13 0.14 0.10 0.11 1.00 3 0.16 0.18 0.17 0.17 0.17 0.20 0.16 0.15 0.18 0.18 1.05 4 0.26 0.28 0.32 0.19 0.35 0.33 0.22 0.28 0.28 0.27 0.95 5 0.10 0.08 0.09 0.10 0.11 0.11 0.09 0.12 0.12 0.12 1.00 6 0.06 0.08 0.08 0.08 0.07 0.06 0.10 0.08 0.09 0.11 1.00 0.20 0.28 0.25 0.36 0.17 0.22 0.33 0.19 0.20 0.16 1.05