15. Read the managerial situation given below and answer the questions that follow. (25) After several years of driving long-haul trucks, Joe Blanka founded his own trucking company, Blanka Transport Inc. (BTI), which specialized in less-than-truckload shipments in the midwestern part of the United States. Joe developed a successful method for scheduling BTIs runs that met or exceeded the delivery expectations of its customers. As a result, BTI shipments were growing at a rate between 15 and 20 percent per year. The growth, however, was not evenly distributed across BTIs territory. On some routes, capacity was overloaded in one direction and underloaded in the other. Joe noticed that the imbalance problem was not stable across time. In some months, capacity was short in one direction, and in other months, it was short in another direction. He thought that one way of solving the problem would be through marketing, by offering incentives to customers whose shipments would improve load balance. Another approach to the problem was to analyze and restructure the routeequipment combinations. He also thought that it might be possible to warehouse some less-urgent shipments for short periods in order to help the balance. Joes son, the first member of the Blanka family to attend college, was a senior in engineering school. He had just completed a course in project management, and after briefly describing some of the basic concepts to his father, he suggested that a process improvement project might be a good way to deal with the balance problem. He thought that the Marketing Manager and the Route Manager could serve as project co-managers. He also felt that some of the older, more experienced drivers might be helpful. The objective of the project would be to decrease the size of the route imbalances by 75 percent in a 1-year period.

Questions a) Is this a proper approach to the problem?

b) Is this a project; if so, what are the three triple constraints?