A manufacturing company makes two products. Each product can be made on either of two machines. The time (in hours) required to make each product on each machine is listed in the file S13_33.xlsx. Each month, 500 hours of time are available on each machine. Each month, customers are willing to buy up to the quantities of each product at the prices also given in the same file. The company’s goal is to maximize the revenue obtained from selling units during the next two months.
a. Determine how the company can meet this goal. Assume that it will not produce any units in a month that it cannot sell in that month.
b. Use SolverTable to see what happens if customer demands for each product in each month simultaneously change by a factor 1 + k. Revise the model so that you can use SolverTable to investigate the effect of this change on total revenue as k varies from -0.3 to 0.3 in increments of 0.1. Does revenue change in a linear manner over this range? Can you explain intuitively why it changes in the way it does?