provide the below elements at a high level for the problem to presentation on below taylor communications topic.

What are the decision variables (what is the management trying to change to meet the objective)? at least the main ones. c. What are the constraints? i. Quantitative ii. Qualitative

What have been the inputs from the marketing or business office in terms of historical data, market research, or the competition? e. What has been the experience of the company with the OR techniques?

Taylor Communications (formerly the Standard Operations Company before its acquisition and rebranding by the Taylor Corporation in 2016) is one of the largest printing conglomerates in the world. It provides high volume print production of forms and print stationery for major firms in and near the United States. It operates dozens of manufacturing facilities across the United States and Mexico. The print market is highly competitive, so company management must continually address the strategic challenge of minimizing the total cost of producing and distributing its products in order to offer competitive pricing. A wide variety of printing presses are available in the various manufacturing facilities and each press has the capacity to perform multiple print jobs. However, the cost of performing any given job can differ greatly from one press to the next. Furthermore, the cost of transporting the finished product to the customer can vary greatly depending on which manufacturing facility is used and the resulting distance to the customer. Given a large number of print jobs that need to be performed over the next time period, the problem is to assign the print jobs to presses. The cost of each individual assignment is the sum of the cost of producing that job on that press and the cost of transporting the finished job to the customer. The objective is to select all of the assignments of jobs to presses so as to minimize the total cost of all the assignments. This is in fact an assignment problem as described in the current section except for the modification that a given press might be able to handle multiple jobs. Therefore, a constraint is added for each press that the total processing time for all of the jobs being assigned to that press cannot exceed the total processing time that is available at that press. Periodically solving this very large assignment problem and implementing this solution has provided an estimated annual savings of over $10 million.