Ken Stark is an operations analyst for an insurance company in Muncie, Indiana. Over the next 6 weeks the company needs to send 2,028,415 pieces of marketing literature to customers in the 16 states shown below.

State Mailing Pieces

AZ ............ 82,380

CA ........... 212,954

CT ............ 63,796

GA ........... 136,562

IL ............ 296,479

MA .......... 99,070

ME ........... 38,848

MN .......... 86,207

MT ........... 33,309

NC .......... 170,997

NJ ............ 104,974

NV ........... 29,608

OH .......... 260,858

OR ........... 63,605

TX ........... 214,076

VA .......... 134,692

TOTAL ........2,028,415

To coordinate with other marketing efforts, all the mailings for a given state must go out in the same week (i.e., if Ken decides to schedule mailings for Georgia in week 2, then all of the 136,562 pieces of mail for Georgia must be sent that week). Ken would like to balance the work load in each week as much as possible and, in particular, would like to minimize the maximum amount of mail to be processed in any given week during the 6-week period.

a. Create a spreadsheet model to determine which states should be processed each week to achieve Ken’s objective.

b. What is the optimal solution?