The Green Valley Assembly Company assembles consumer electronics products for manufacturers that need temporary extra production capacity.

Question:

The Green Valley Assembly Company assembles consumer electronics products for manufacturers that need temporary extra production capacity. As such, it has periodic product changes. Because the products Green Valley assembles are marketed under the label of well-known manufacturers, high quality is a must.

Tom Bradley, of the Green Valley personnel department, has been very impressed by recent research concerning job-enrichment programs. In particular, he has been impressed with the increases in quality that seem to be associated with these programs. How-ever, some studies have shown no significant increase in quality, and they imply that the money spent on such programs has not been worthwhile.

Tom has talked to Sandra Hansen, the production manager, about instituting a job-enrichment program in the assembly operation at Green Valley. Sandra was somewhat pessimistic about the potential, but she agreed to introduce the program. The plan was to implement the program in one wing of the plant and continue with the current method in the other wing. The procedure was to be in effect for six months. After that period, a test would be made to determine the effectiveness of the job-enrichment program.

After the six-month trial period, a random sample of employees from each wing produced the following output measures:

The Green Valley Assembly Company assembles consumer electronics products for

Both Sandra and Tom wonder whether the job-enrichment program has affected production output. They would like to use these sample results to determine whether the average output has changed and to determine whether the employees' consistency has been affected by the new program.
A second sample from each wing was selected. The measure was the quality of the products assembled. In the "old" wing, 79 products were tested and 12% were found to be defectively assembled. In the "job-enriched" wing, 123 products were examined and 9% were judged defectively assembled.
With all these data, Sandra and Tom are beginning to get a little confused. However, they realize that there must be some way to use the information to make a judgment about the effectiveness of the job-enrichment program.