E13.2 (LO 2), AP You are a management accountant for a frozen foods shipping company, Navia Inc. Your company operates just like Fedex and UPS, except that it handles only frozen foods. The company receives frozen foods from vendors, packages orders, loads them onto trucks, and ships them out. Due to the large-scale orders, most of your clients are businesses. There are three worksheets in the data set: sales, packaging and trucking, and employee.

Sales. The sales worksheet gives us the sales transaction information from the end of 2024 to the end of 2025. The transaction ID is the unique identifier for each sales transaction. The worksheet also gives us the dates shown on the invoice and the total sales amount. Packaging and trucking. The packaging and trucking process worksheet includes the transaction ID for each sales transaction as well as the time, in minutes, needed for each step of the process: receiving, packaging, quality check (QC), and trucking. To control for the quality of the work, each employee needs to scan his or her badge so its known who is handling each batch of products. Employee. The employee worksheet gives us employee ID (EmpID), hourly wage, experience (in years), education level, and age (in years). You have been brainstorming with your colleagues to find a way to shorten the process from receiving to trucking so that employees spend less time working in a frozen room.

Required

Use the Shipping Company data set available in Wiley Course Resources to answer the following questions. (Note: See the tutorial on creating Excel pivot tables in Wiley Course Resources if needed.)

a. Is there a specific bottleneck process? That is, is there one process that consistently takes longer than the other processes? b. Your colleague mentioned to you that some employees may not be well suited for the packaging activity, as they take more time to pack orders than others do. Can you verify the accuracy of this statement by using the data set? Does it matter how many packaging transactions each employee completed?