Data-Based Business Decisions Answers

Tony is the staff manager of a movie theater, and he is trying to decide which shifts should have the greatest number of employees on staff. Over the course of a week, Tony recorded how many customers appeared during each shift, the results of which can be seen in the graph below. Tony wants the distribution of his employees to match the distribution of the customers. If Tony has 230 total employees, how many should he assign to the 1:00 p.m. shift?

The following graph shows Caroline’s sales records since she started her position 22 months ago. Caroline’s two managers, Shawna and Morris, are having a meeting to discuss her performance. To prepare, Morris looks at Caroline’s sales over the past four months, and Shawna looks at Caroline’s total records. How is Shawna’s opinion likely to differ from Morris’s?

In the decision-making process, why is it important to gather relevant information before making a decision?

You are the manager of a clothing store. You must decide how many of your employees to put on the sales floor, and how many to put on the register. Because employees on the sales floor cause customers to buy more products, if you do not have at least 2 employees on the register for every 5 employees working on the sales floor, your registers will get very clogged and you will lose business. You have a total of 84 employees, and you wish to have as many on the sales floor as possible. How should you divide your employees?

It is the policy of stores owned by the Talkara Co. to give out bonuses to salespeople every six months. The size of the bonus is determined by averaging (taking the mean of) the two highest and the lowest monthly sales totals from the six-month period, taking 8% of the result, and splitting it evenly among the salespeople. The graph below shows sales for the most recent bonus period. If there are six salespeople, how much money will each one receive, to the nearest dollar?

Natasha is a regional manager for a chain of supermarkets. She has been tasked with researching the weekly sales records of two branch locations over the past month, which she must present to her board of directors. She was able to assemble the relevant information in the table below, but it is scrambled and hard to read. Sales are listed in thousands of dollars. Week 4 1 1 3 4 2 3 2 Sales 16.3 17.8 23.1 15.2 20.2 23.4 22.9 17.6 Branch North South North South South North North South In order to make the data more readable, Natasha has decided to put it into a graph. Which of the following graphs accurately matches the information in the table? I. II. III. IV.