Question Charles and his younger brother, Edward, purchased Carpita Bottling Company from their father in 1983. The company bottles and distributes soda and beer in Nakuru. Since purchasing the company, Charles has been instrumental in modernizing operations. One of the latest acquisitions is a filling machine that can be adjusted to fill at any average level desired. Because the bottles and cans filled by the company are exclusively the 12-grams size, when they received the machine, Charles set the fill level to 12 grams and left it that way. According to the manufacturer’s specifications, the machine will fill bottles or cans around the average, with a standard deviation of 0.15 grams. Charles just returned from a convention at which he attended a panel discussion related to problems with filling machines. One bottling company representative discussed a problem her company had. It failed to learn that its machine’s average fill went out of adjustment until several months later, when its cost accounting department reported some problems with beer production in bulk not matching output in bottles and cans. It turns out that the machine’s average fill had increased from 12 grams to 12.07 grams. With large volumes of production, this deviation meant a substantial loss in profits. Another company reported the same type of problem, but in the opposite direction. Its machine began filling bottles with slightly less than 12 grams on the average. Although the consumers could not detect the shortage in a given bottle, the state agencies responsible for checking the accuracy of packaged products discovered the problem in their testing and substantially fined the company for the underfill. These problems were a surprise to Charles. He had not considered the possibility that the machine might go out of adjustment and pose these types of problems. In fact, he became very concerned because the problems of losing profits and potentially being fined by the government were ones that he wished to avoid, if possible. After the con