A manufacturer of industrial wheels is losing many profitable orders because of the long time it takes the firm's marketing, engineering, and accounting departments to develop price quotes for potential customers.

To remedy this problem the firm's management would like to set guidelines for the length of time each department should spend developing price quotes.To help develop these guidelines, 50 requests for pri~e quotes were randomly selected from the set of all price quotes made last year; the processing time (in days) was determined for each price quote for each department. These times are displayed in the table below. The price quotes are also classified by whether they were "lost" (i.e., whether or not the customer placed an order after receiving the price quote).

a. MINITAB stem-and-leaf displays for each of the departments and for the total processing time are givcn on pg. 109. Note that the units of the leaves for accounting and total processing times are units (1.0), while the leaf units for marketing and engineering processing times are tenths (.I). Shade the leavcs that correspond to "lost" orders in each of the displays, and interpret each of the displays.

b. Using your results from part

a, develop "maximum processing time" guidelines for each department that, if followed, will help the firm reduce the number of lost orders.