Stratified and Cluster Sampling for Supply Chain Audits
topic
Stratified sampling divides textile supplier populations into homogeneous risk strata based on audit history, production volume, and product category, allocating inspection effort proportionally to stratum risk level; cluster sampling selects geographic or organisational clusters of suppliers for intensive audit rather than individual supplier random sampling, reducing audit travel cost while maintaining population coverage.
Role
Optimises textile supply chain audit resource allocation by concentrating inspection effort in proportion to supplier risk profile rather than sampling uniformly across all suppliers, enabling supply chain quality assurance programmes to achieve adequate statistical coverage of high-risk supplier segments within realistic audit budget constraints.