P
i work in a candy factory that makes airheads candy and currently we use a vertical form fill bagger to fill a bag with three different types of airheads (normally cherry, blue raspberry, watermelon). our biggest complaint always seems to be that someone "only got two reds!" in their bag or something similar.
on our machine 3 hoppers are filled with different colors that are vibrated to fill the bucket conveyor up which then dumps into the actual bagger at the top.
what i am planning on doing is taking a number of bags, counting them up, and seeing what kind of ratio we are really getting. then i want to see if i take a large box with all three colors and mix them up really good before they go into the conveyor if it is improved at all. i think with current hopper system with 1 color in each it may be putting out waves of each color causing the bags to be skewed. what my boss said he wants to know is if mixing them more gives us a better ratio of colors in the bags.
what i am wondering is how i would calculate my sample size for this?
i know it is discrete data so i will need a TON of data to statistically prove anything. i am guessing more than is really feasible in this case.
any of you statistics gurus out there that can give me some help on this it would be very much appreciated. its been a while since statistics class so the methods for sample size determination aren't too fresh in my head
also any other kind of insight into this problem would be very much appreciated.
on our machine 3 hoppers are filled with different colors that are vibrated to fill the bucket conveyor up which then dumps into the actual bagger at the top.
what i am planning on doing is taking a number of bags, counting them up, and seeing what kind of ratio we are really getting. then i want to see if i take a large box with all three colors and mix them up really good before they go into the conveyor if it is improved at all. i think with current hopper system with 1 color in each it may be putting out waves of each color causing the bags to be skewed. what my boss said he wants to know is if mixing them more gives us a better ratio of colors in the bags.
what i am wondering is how i would calculate my sample size for this?
i know it is discrete data so i will need a TON of data to statistically prove anything. i am guessing more than is really feasible in this case.
any of you statistics gurus out there that can give me some help on this it would be very much appreciated. its been a while since statistics class so the methods for sample size determination aren't too fresh in my head

also any other kind of insight into this problem would be very much appreciated.