capacity concerns
APMA1210 – Operations Research
Final Project
By: S. Sajjad Hasan
Introduction
For my project I picked a case out the Hillier textbook, specifically Case 11.1 (Pages 533 – 535). In this case,
Communicorp, a leading communication technology company is faced with financial difficulty due to disorganized internal communications. In order to remedy the situation, the CEO instructs us to phase in a corporate intranet to help departments communicate effectively. The schedule for different departments to ‘go live’ on the intranet is set, and we have to purchase the appropriate servers, minimizing cost and making sure that the intranet has enough capacity to handle the employees that start using the intranet each month.
I picked this case because it resembles the types of problems that I faced during my summer internship at The CocaCola Company. One of my responsibilities was to assist in the cost analysis of a large software implementation.
Different departments would go live in different weeks and I had to cost out the different implementation strategies.
At the time, I did not know what went into the decision making process for different strategies, but after taking
Operations Research, I know that I am better equipped to understand and formulate optimal implementation solutions. This case uses mixed integer programming, and to solve the optimization problems, I used LINGO 11.1.
Case Background
We have been given the implementation schedule, as follows:
Month
Department
Month 1
None
Month 2
Sales
Month 3
Manufacturing
Month 4
Warehouse
Month 5
Marketing
In month one, the company plans to educate employees, so we do not have to do anything
The company has 365 employees in total. They are divided into the following departments:
Department
Sales
Manufacturing
Warehouse
Marketing
Number of Employees
60
200
30
75
To implement the intranet, we need to purchase servers. Each server supports a certain number of
Final Project
By: S. Sajjad Hasan
Introduction
For my project I picked a case out the Hillier textbook, specifically Case 11.1 (Pages 533 – 535). In this case,
Communicorp, a leading communication technology company is faced with financial difficulty due to disorganized internal communications. In order to remedy the situation, the CEO instructs us to phase in a corporate intranet to help departments communicate effectively. The schedule for different departments to ‘go live’ on the intranet is set, and we have to purchase the appropriate servers, minimizing cost and making sure that the intranet has enough capacity to handle the employees that start using the intranet each month.
I picked this case because it resembles the types of problems that I faced during my summer internship at The CocaCola Company. One of my responsibilities was to assist in the cost analysis of a large software implementation.
Different departments would go live in different weeks and I had to cost out the different implementation strategies.
At the time, I did not know what went into the decision making process for different strategies, but after taking
Operations Research, I know that I am better equipped to understand and formulate optimal implementation solutions. This case uses mixed integer programming, and to solve the optimization problems, I used LINGO 11.1.
Case Background
We have been given the implementation schedule, as follows:
Month
Department
Month 1
None
Month 2
Sales
Month 3
Manufacturing
Month 4
Warehouse
Month 5
Marketing
In month one, the company plans to educate employees, so we do not have to do anything
The company has 365 employees in total. They are divided into the following departments:
Department
Sales
Manufacturing
Warehouse
Marketing
Number of Employees
60
200
30
75
To implement the intranet, we need to purchase servers. Each server supports a certain number of