I have a question that was never directly addressed in any of my business
text books.  Please excuse my lack of knowledge in this area; as I just need
a push in the right direction.

My current job requires me to analyze margins from the sales of various
products and provide an average for each during the quarter. I am using a
very large sample of all product sales by month. (Margin, i.e. not markup.
For those not familiar, markup is what a business does to receive Margin.
Margin is a measure of profitability.  A typical calculation for margin is,
(Unit Resale Price - Unit Cost) / Unit Resale Price ).

An example of the data is:

Product    Margin
ProdX       .35
ProdX       .64
ProdX        .30
ProdB        .22
ProdB        .27
ProdC        .64
ProdC        .35
ProdX        1.12
ProdX        .04
ProdX        .57

Assuming a normal distribution, what method should I use to calculate my
averages? Should I simply take the sample mean?  Should I remove anomalies
like 112% margins? Should I calculate upper and lower control limits and
place my data into a normal curve?

Thank you for your help.
-Chris





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