The Boola Boola Biscuit Company produces Crackers, Cookies and Chips. It has outlets in Ashmum and Branford.
Question:
- The Boola Boola Biscuit Company produces Crackers, Cookies and Chips. It has outlets in Ashmum and Branford. It is the company's policy that its production must satisfy the demand at the outlets. The monthly demand for the products (in thousand pounds) are:
Ashmum | Branford | |
Crackers | 20 | 30 |
Cookies | 50 | 25 |
Chips | 30 | 20 |
The company has two production facilities, one in Milford and one in Guilford. Each facility can make each product.
Production involves two key operations ---baking and packing. The oven capacity at the Milford and Guilford bakeries are, respectively, 150 and 100 thousand pounds (of raw ingredients fed in) per month.Each facility uses its own packing line, which packs the Crackers and Chips that it bakes. Cookies are shipped in bulk; they need not be packed. The capacities of the packing lines in Milford and Guilford are, respectively, 80 and 50 thousand pounds per month. This capacity is measured in the quantity processed through the packing line.
The baking line in Milford is not automated, and an agreement has been reached with the Milford workers that at least 60 percent of its baking (as measured by oven usage) must be devoted to Cookies, which are more labor intensive than Crackers and Chips.
The shipping cost is the same for all products. The cost (in dollars) per thousand pounds shipped from the bakeries to the outlets is given below:
Ashmum | Branford | |
Milford | 15 | 30 |
Guilford | 20 | 10 |
The production costs (in dollars per thousand pounds of raw ingredients fed) are:
Milford | Guilford | |
Crackers | 5 | 4 |
Cookies | 6 | 7 |
Chips | 5 | 5 |
The Operations Manager of the Boola Boola Biscuit Company must design a production/distribution plan so that the total monthly costs --- manufacturing and transportation costs --- are as low as possible.
The Operations Manager must decide how much of each product to manufacture at each bakery and how much to ship to each outlet.
- (14 points) Formulate a linear program to solve this problem. Define your decision variables and explain the constraints.
- (14 points) Use Solver to solve the linear program.
Expert Answer:
