ΠΜΣ: Μαθηματικά των Υπολογιστών και των Αποφάσεων

3. THE MAJOR ELECTRIC CORPORATION
Henry Lee is the Vice President of Purchasing for the consumer electronics division of the Major Electric
Corporation (MEC). The company recently introduced a new type of video camcorder that has taken the
market by storm. Although Henry is pleased with the strong demand for this product in the market place,
it has been a challenge to keep up with MEC's distributors' orders of this camcorder. His current challenge
is how to meet requests from MEC's major distributors in Pittsburgh, Denver, Baltimore, and Houston
who have placed orders of 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, and 25,000 units, respectively, for delivery in two
months (there is a one-month manufacturing and one-month shipping lead time for this product). MEC has
contracts with companies in Hong Kong, Korea, and Singapore who manufacture camcorders for the
company under the MEC label. These contracts require MEC to order a specified minimum number of
units each month at a guaranteed per unit cost. The contracts also specify the maximum number of units
that may be ordered at this price. The following table summarizes these contracts:
MEC also has a standing contract with a shipping company to transport product from each of these
suppliers to ports in San Francisco and San Diego. The cost of shipping from each supplier to each port is
given in the following table along with the minimum required and maximum allowable number of
shipping cartons each month:
Under the terms of this contract, MEC guarantees it will send at least 20 but no more than 65
shipping containers to San Francisco each month and at least 30 but no more than 70 shipping containers
to San Diego each month.
Each shipping container can hold 1,000 video cameras and will ultimately be trucked from the
seaports on to the distributors. Again, MEC has a standing contract with a trucking company to provide
trucking services each month. The cost of trucking a shipping container from each port to each distributor
is summarized in the following table.
As with the other contracts, to obtain the prices given above, MEC is required to use a certain
minimum amount of trucking capacity on each route each month and may not exceed certain maximum
shipping amounts without incurring cost penalties. These minimum and maximum shipping restrictions
are summarized in the following table.
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