Assume you have a business with ten employees, and you want to choose a time slot to give a lunch break to them. You have four different time slots as candidates, and you want to choose the one in which the chances of having customers are lower. How would you use the knowledge from this unit to make this decision? Which probability distribution do you use? What data do you need to collect?

Response :

Hello professor andclass, in this scenario the bestoptionforprobability distributionwould bePoissondistributionalso known aswaiting time distribution.This ispredominantly usedto predict the probability of events that will occur based on how often the eventhashappened in the past. It gives the possibility of a given number of events occurring in a set ofperiods(Madhuri. T, 2021).

The data I would collect would be:

the average number of customers thatenter during any given time of the day

the average durationof eachcustomer'stransaction(example shopping time)

the average time it takes each employee to cash a customer out

This would give me a general idea of how many employees per customer we need at any given time.Because thePoisson distributionfocuses on fixed intervals, it would be best to segment theworkdayinto four timeslots.If we are open from 9am to 5pm, I would segment 2hour timeslots:

9amto 11am

11amto1pm

1pm to 3pm

3pm-5pm

Withthis data I could then set standard lunch breaks, or even staggered lunch breaks.

OpenStax College. (2017).Introductory Business Statistics. OpenStax.https://openstax.org/books/introductory-business-statistics/pages/5-key-terms

Question :

If the lunch breaks that you offer your workers are only 30 minutes, even after identifying what is the lowest traffic 2 hour-long block on average, would you do anything to further break down your data into that half h our timeframes or leave your findings as-is?