A manufacturer of industrial motors has identified 10 new prospective customers for its products with estimates for each customer's annual sales potential as follows:

The company would like to allocate these 10 prospective customers to 5 of its current salespeople in the most equitable way possible. (Each customer may be assigned to only 1 sales person.) To do this, ideally, the customers assigned to each of the 5 salespeople would have exactly the same sales potential. If such a solution is not possible, the company would like to minimize the total amount by which the actual sales potentials for the customers assigned to each salesperson deviate from the ideal allocation.
a. Ideally, what sales potential should be assigned to each salesperson?
b. Formulate a mathematical programming model for this problem.
c. Implement your model in a spreadsheet and solve it.
d. What is the optimal solution?

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Customer 1 2 3 45 67 8 910 Sales Potentia $113 $106 $84 $52 $155 $103 $87 $91 $128 $131 in $1,000,000s)