Check the inventory
A bakery works out how many kilograms of flour it needs from its bread production schedule. What kind of demand is the demand for flour?
A) Independent demand
B) Dependent demand
C) Seasonal demand
D) Support demand
B) Dependent demand
Lean operations grew out of the production system of which company?
A) Ford
B) Toyota
C) Honda
D) Tesla
B) Toyota
As a quality goal, what does “Six Sigma” allow?
A) No more than 6 defects per million opportunities
B) No more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities
C) No more than 1 defect per thousand units
D) Zero defects
B) No more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities
A company discovers a new battery chemistry in its lab and then starts looking for products it could be used in. What kind of product development is this?
A) Market pull
B) Technology push
C) Value engineering
D) Reverse engineering
B) Technology push
On Sunday 27 September 2026, something happened to every New Zealander at 2 am. What was it?
A) A national tsunami siren test
B) The clocks went forward one hour for daylight saving
C) The clocks went back one hour for daylight saving
D) The Reserve Bank released a new $5 coin
B) The clocks went forward one hour for daylight saving
Theft, damage, spoilage and obsolescence (“shrinkage”) belong to which type of inventory cost?
A) Ordering costs
B) Stockout costs
C) Carrying (holding) costs
D) Setup costs
C) Carrying (holding) costs
A hospital supply room keeps two containers of each consumable. In this “two-bin” system, what tells staff to reorder?
A) One bin becoming empty
B) A weekly schedule from the purchasing department
C) A reorder request by hospital staff
D) Two bins becoming empty
A) One bin becoming empty
On 27 August 2026, China launched a year-long auto quality drive that requires recalls of defective cars. A recall falls into which cost-of-quality category?
A) Prevention
B) Appraisal
C) Internal failure
D) External failure
D) External failure
A streaming service adds a “skip intro” button to its existing app. What type of new product is this?
A) Breakthrough
B) Next-generation
C) Incremental
D) Market pull
C) Incremental
The All Blacks’ four-test series against the Springboks ended on 12 September 2026 (13 September NZ time) in a very unusual place for a rugby test. Where?
A) Johannesburg
B) Cape Town
C) Baltimore, USA
D) London
C) Baltimore, USA
In an ABC analysis, what do class A items typically look like?
A) About 50% of items, about 5% of annual value
B) About 30% of items, about 15–25% of annual value
C) About 80% of items, about 20% of annual value
D) About 20% of items, about 70–80% of annual value
D) About 20% of items, about 70–80% of annual value
Taiichi Ohno considered one waste the most fundamental, because it generates every other waste behind it. Which one?
A) Inventory
B) Waiting
C) Defects
D) Overproduction
D) Overproduction
A budget airline offers no meals, no extra legroom and no lounge, but its flights leave and arrive on time, every time, exactly as promised. How would you describe its quality?
A) A basic design, delivered with high conformance quality
B) A premium design, delivered with low conformance quality
C) Low quality, because it lacks features
D) High design quality, because it is always on time
A) A basic design, delivered with high conformance quality
Which tool translates the “voice of the customer” into technical characteristics, using a “house of quality”?
A) Quality function deployment (QFD)
B) Design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA)
C) Value analysis
D) Stage-Gate
A) Quality function deployment (QFD)
The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes, for research that “first makes people laugh, then makes them think,” were announced on 3 September 2026. Which design won the Physics prize?
A) A splash-free urinal
B) Burying 1,000 pairs of underpants in more than 25 countries
C) Milk from cockroaches
D) A paper airplane that folds itself
A) A splash-free urinal
A shop sells 400 units a year at a steady rate. Each order costs $50 to place, and holding one unit for a year costs $4. What is the economic order quantity?
A) 200 units
B) 100 units
C) 71 units
D) 10,000 units
B) 100 units
A cell works an 8-hour shift with 60 minutes of breaks in total. Customer demand is 210 units per day. What is the takt time?
A) 0.5 minutes per unit
B) 2.29 minutes per unit
C) 2 minutes per unit
D) It depends on the cycle time of the slowest station
C) 2 minutes per unit
A factory inspects 2,000 units. Each unit has 5 opportunities for a defect, and the inspectors find 30 defects. What is the DPMO (Defects per million opportunities)?
A) 15,000
B) 300
C) 3,000
D) 30
C) 3,000
Volkswagen builds many different models, across several of its brands, on the same shared MQB platform. Which complexity reduction approach is this?
A) Standardisation
B) Commonality
C) Value engineering
D) Modularity
D) Modularity
On 12 October 2026, Americans Robert Hall and Michael Woodford won the Nobel Prize in Economics. What was it for?
A) Explaining “creative destruction” and innovation-driven growth
B) Research on women’s labour market outcomes
C) “Nudging” people towards better decisions
D) The microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation
D) The microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic stabilisation
You’re ordering pizza for the end-of-semester party. You have to order in the morning, before you know how many students will come, and there’s no chance to reorder. Which inventory model fits this situation?
The newsvendor problem
Lean warns that introducing a pull system into the wrong process will “starve” it. What does a process need before pull can work?
Short and reliable replenishment lead times and stable quality.
In the Six Sigma paper airplane activity, your group followed a five-stage improvement cycle. What is it called, and what are its five stages, in order?
DMAIC: Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control.
Running product development concurrently (marketing, design, process engineering and production overlapping in one team) shortens time to market. What is the price you pay for it?
Rework is expected
On 9 September 2026, Apple unveiled its first foldable, the iPhone Duo, priced from US$1,999. It goes on sale on 23 October. To make the design work, Apple left out one feature that every other current iPhone has. Which feature is missing?
Face ID.