Vision Corporation: Production Planning and Shipping Vision is a large company that produces video- capturing devices for military applications such as missiles, long-range cameras, and aerial drones. Four different types of cameras (differing mainly by lens type) are made in the three plants in the system. Each plant can produce any of the four camera types, although each plant has its own individual constraints and unit costs. These constraints cover labor and ma- chining restrictions, and the speci?c values are given in Tables 8-10. Note that even though the products are identical in the three plants, different production processes are used and thus the products use different amounts of resources in different plants. The corpo- ration controls the material that goes into the lenses; the material requirements for each product are given in the last column of Tables 8-10. A total of 3,500 pounds of material is available for the entire system during the planning period. Transport has 3 major customers (RAYco, HONco, and MMco) for its products. The maximum sales for each customer-product pair is given in Table 11. Prod- uct sales prices are given in Table 12, and the ship- ping costs from each plant to each customer are de- tailed in Table 13. Table 14 contains the production costs for each product-plant pair.
All shipping from plants 1 and 2 that goes to RAYco or HONco must go through a special inspec- tion. These units are sent to a central site, inspected, and then sent to their destination. The capacity of this special inspection site is 1,500 pieces.
Your job is to determine a recommendation for the company. A recommendation must include a plan for production and shipping as well as the cost and rev- enue generated from each plant. In addition, you should address the following potential issues in your recommendation:
If you could get more material, how much would you like? How would you use it? What would you be willing to pay? If you could get more inspection capacity, how much would you like? How would you use it? What would you be willing to pay?