Question

An executive is looking at the job performance resulting from two different manufacturing processes and finds that the mean performance of process A is 83.2 and the mean performance of process B is 80.5. Why can the executive not automatically assume that process A will consistently outperform process B?

Answer 1

Mean is the measure of central tendency .

To describe a situation completely the measure of central tendency alone are not sufficient .they do not give us the complete picture of the situations being compared.

So along with mean we need another measure which is measure of dispersion i.e. standard Deviation .

So based only on mean the executive can't assume that process A will consistently outperform perform B since in some area it may be possible that B has outperformed than A and .

Mean only gives us the average performance only.