Canadian Football League (CFL) is Canada's equivalent of the U.S. National Football League (NFL). It had a challenge of organizing 81 football games for 9 teams over a period of 5 months optimally while stabilizing matching priorities for sales revenue, television ratings, and the team rest days. Other considerations include organizing games over different time zones and the main rivalry games to be held on major public holidays. For any league, a robust schedule is a driving force for a variety of business collaborations, such as coordinating with broadcasting channels and organizing ground ticket sales. If the schedule is not optimized, it would directly hamper the promotions thus resulting in a huge loss of revenue and bad channel ratings.
CFL used to create match schedules manually and hence had to figure out finer ways to improve their schedules, taking all the constraints into account.
They had tried to work with a consultant to build a comprehensive model for scheduling, but the implementation remained a challenge. The League decided to tackle the issue with the Solver available within Microsoft Excel. Some of the matching priorities to be balanced while optimizing the schedule were:
1. Sales Revenue-Setting a schedule with matches and time slots to those clubs that generate more revenue.
2. Channel Ratings-Setting a schedule with games that would improve channel ratings for the broadcasting company.
3. Team Rest Days-Setting a schedule with the two teams playing against each other having enough rest days.
The league decided to improve the match schedules by giving the player rest days as a higher priority, followed by sales revenue and channel scores for the broadcasting company. This is mainly because the sales revenue and channel scores are a byproduct of team players' performance on the field, which is directly related to the rest days taken by the teams.

Questions for Discussion
1. List three ways in which Solver based scheduling of games could result in more revenue as compared to the manual scheduling.
2. In what other ways can CFL leverage the Solver software to expand and enhance their other business operations?
3. What other considerations could be important in scheduling such games?