1 Background In this assessment, we will work on a company called MaveriCo, which has been operating across different cities around the world. The management team is planning to expand to the Kingdom of Square, a new market they recently identified. MaveriCo relied on a key component provider, Kii Supplies, for its production. In order to expand to the new market, MaveriCo has negotiated with Kii Supplies to set up a warehouse in the Kingdom of Square. MaveriCo also decides to set up assembly facilities in the Kingdom of Square to quickly respond to customers. You were assigned for this project as the supply chain manager of MaveriCo! You will need to design a proper supply network to support MaveriCo's operations in the Kingdom of Square. 2 Data Collection To start with the project, you requested some data from MaveriCo. MaveriCo believes that the demand might be related to a city's population, or relates to the number of years it stayed in the city, or both. Based on this assumption, they provided some data shown in Table 1 for the demand information across a number of cities. Apparently, you want to check whether MaveriCo's assumption is correct and use your findings to figure out the potential demands for the cities in the Kingdom of Square. Table 2 presents the name, population, and the coordinates for each city. The distance between any two cities can be assumed to be the Euclidean distance with a circuity factor kCF of 1.30 . Your also checked with Kii Supplies about its preferred location for the warehouse. Kii Supplies agreed to set up its warehouse based on the last digit of your student number as shown in Table 2. For example, if the last digit of your student number is '5', Kii Supplies will set up its warehouse in Edofield. Kii Supplies also recommended a transport company Table 1: Demand information across a number of cities. that could manage the inbound and outbound logistics for you. The quoted transport price is $0.005 /component/unit distance traveled for inbound logistics (i.e., from Kii Supplies to your assembly facilities), and $0.01/ product/unit distance traveled for outbound logistics (i.e., from your assembly facilities to the cities). Table 2: Population and coordinates for each city. To set up an assembly facility, it will cost you $100,000 per facility. You will need to take this into consideration when you choose your assembly sites and design your distribution network. To facilitate your work, you were advised to focus on the first year for the operations in the Kingdom of Square. Each component received from Kii Supplies will be assembled into one finished product. 3 The Task You believe by now you have got all the required data and you are ready to start. Your task will need you to use the knowledge acquired in this course, explain the rationale behind your chosen approaches, document your analysis, and present your results to the management team of MaveriCo. The following list offers some ideas for you to think further (remember this is not an exhaustive list): - What determines the fixed cost for the assembly facilities