The Wallace Company of Houston is a distributor of pipes, valves, and fittings to the refining, chemical, and petrochemical industries. The company was a recent winner of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. One of the steps the company takes to monitor the quality of its distribution process is to send out a survey twice a year to a subset of its current, customers, asking the customers to rate the speed of deliveries, the accuracy of invoices, and the quality of the packaging of the products they have received from Wallace.
a. Describe the process studied.
b. Describe the variables of interest.
c. Describe the sample.
d. Describe the inferences of interest.
e. What are some of the factors that are likely to affect the reliability of the inferences?