A company manufactures mechanical heart valves from the heart valves of pigs. Different heart operations require valves of different sizes. The company purchases pig valves from three different suppliers. The cost and size mix of the valves purchased from each supplier are given in the file P03_36.xlsx. This file also contains the maximum number of values available from each supplier per month. Each month, the company places an order with each supplier. At least 1,300 large, 900 medium, and 400 small valves must be purchased each month. Use Solver to determine how the company can minimize the cost of acquiring the needed valves.

a. What is the optimized cost of acquiring the needed valves? Round your answer to a whole dollar amount. $

How many valves should the company purchase from each of the three suppliers? Round your answers to whole numbers.

	Purchases
Supplier 1
Supplier 2
Supplier 3

b. Use SolverTable to investigate the effect on total cost of increasing its minimal purchase requirements each month. Specifically, see how the total cost changes as the minimal purchase requirements of large, medium, and small valves all increase from their original values by the same percentage. Revise your model so that SolverTable can be used to investigate these changes when the percentage increase varies from 2% to 40% in increments of 2%.

The total cost Selectincreasesdecreasesremains constantItem 5 , as the minimum purchase requirements increase, Selectand it does sobut notItem 6 at a constant rate. However, when the percentage increase reaches %, there is not enough capacity to meet such large requirements.