A case study of production expansion planning in a soft-drink manufacturing company

This paper discusses the problem of production expansion planning in a soft-drink manufacturing company. We first formulate the problem as a large-scale transportation problem by making some realistic simplifications. We then program the transportation algorithm on a spreadsheet software to help solve the problem on a microcomputer. Through this case study we demonstrate how some standard Operational Research OR technique can be combined with low-cost microcomputers to become an effective management tool to handle complex management decision problems.