In a manufacturing plant, a work center is a specific production facility that consists of one or more people and or machines and is treated as one unit for the purposes of capacity requirements planning and job scheduling. If the jobs arriveat a particular work center at a faster rate than they depart, the work center impedes the overall production process and is referred to as a bottleneck. This sample was collected by an operations manager for use in investigating a potential bottleneck work center. There are 315 hours in the work week when items can come into the work center. The manager selects every 15th hour and counts how many items come into the work center during that hour. What type of sample is this?

Systematic sampling is a sampling technique in which the first sample selection is a random selection but other subsequent selection of samples occurs within a fixed sampling interval. The determination of this interval is based on the division of the population size by sample size.

Let assume that, our first random selection is [tex]i^{th}[/tex] unit, then the other fixed selection occurs at a fixed sampling interval of k.

Therefore, using systematic sampling method, the sampling unit will be every [tex]k^{th}[/tex] unit after the [tex]i^{th}[/tex] unit.

From the question given:

We notice that the manager selects a sampling unit every 15th hour. This tells us that he is taking the sampling unit by the usage of a fixed time interval.

Hence, this appears to be a systematic sample.