Business Analysis with Microsoft® Excel, Second Edition

Performing Acceptance Sampling

Acceptance sampling often enables you to reduce the cost of goods that you purchase. It can also enable you to control the costs you incur when a purchaser returns products to you due to defects.

You do not want to purchase materials, whether supplies or equipment, that are faulty. Nor do you want to offer defective goods for sale. However, it is normal for the purchaser and the seller of large amounts of merchandise to negotiate an acceptable fraction of that merchandise that may be defective.

Here's the reasoning. It is extremely expensive to produce any appreciable amount—one lot, say—of goods that has no defective units. To do so, the producer would have to perform 100% testing, because any less would run the ...