Managers sometimes make the mistake of trying to solve an assignment problem by hand by assigning workers to jobs according to a “best rating next” myopic decision rule, where the next assignment made is the one that has the lowest remaining cost (for a minimization problem) or highest remaining rating (for a maximization problem). Such an approach can lead to poor decisions because it doesn’t consider the impact on the remaining assignments to be made. Consider a repair shop, similar to the Fix-It Shop example in Section 5.6, with three workers and three projects. Estimated project repair costs are provided in the following table.

(a) Use the “best rating next” rule described above to assign workers to projects. What is the total cost?

(b) Solve the problem optimally using Excel. What is the total cost?

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Project Person 1 2 3 Donovan $20 $28 $30 Edwards $26 $24 $25 Franklin $18 $20 $22