Acme Home Improvements, Inc. was founded in 1982 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. By 2007 the company had 125 stores along the US East Coast from Florida to Maine. Its annual sales are currently $5,400,000,000 with $280,000,000 net income. The average store is about 100,000 square feet with an additional 10,000 square feet of outside garden center. The stores typically carry 40,000 different products from 5,000 vendors worldwide. Major US competitors include Ace, Home Depot, Lowe's and TruValue.

In the interest of seeking greater profits, Acme has determined to follow Home Depot and other competitors to Canada and Mexico. In the latter, it has established, in accordance with Mexican law, a joint venture with local interests, known as Acme Home Improvements de México, SA de CV. There are five major product groups within each Acme store: plumbing and electrical supplies, building materials, hardware and tools, seasonal and garden/yard items, and paint, flooring and wall coverings.

Each store has a store manager, assistant store manager, bookkeeper, an information systems manager and an assistant, a manager for each of the five major product groups, customer service employees on the store floor to assist customers with their purchases, cashiers, receiving/stocking employees, and maintenance/janitorial employees.

Employee Assignment Schedule

To the extent permitted by local law, each Acme Home Improvements store, including AMC, is open from 7 am - 11 pm every day. AMC planners have provided the following table, which identifies the minimum number of customer service employees needed on the floor each hour of the day:

Time Period	Minimum number of employees
7 am - 8 am	15
8 am - 9 am	15
9 am - 10 am	15
10 am - 11 am	20
11 am - 12 pm	20
12 pm - 1 pm	20
1 pm - 2 pm	20
2 pm - 3 pm	20
3 pm - 4 pm	25
4 pm - 5 pm	25
5 pm - 6 pm	25
6 pm - 7 pm	20
7 pm - 8 pm	20
8 pm - 9 pm	15
9 pm - 10 pm	15
10 pm - 11 pm	15

Full-time employees at AMC work a 9-hour shift (8 hours of work plus a 1-hour unpaid meal break) either from 7 am to 4 pm or from 2 pm to 11 pm.

Workers on the 7-4 shift are assigned an hour-long lunch break at either 10 am, 11 am or 12 noon.

Workers on the 2-11 shift are assigned an hour-long dinner break at either 5 pm, 6 pm or 7 pm.

Part-time employees work four consecutive hours per day and their shifts can start any time between 7 am and 7 pm.

By corporate policy, which is consistent with Mexican labor law, the company limits total part-time hours to 50% of the day's total hours (Not the number of total employees), part-time hours plus full-time hours worked.

Part-time employees earn $300 per day, and full-time employees earn $750 per day in salary and benefits ($ = Moneda Nacional, ie, the Mexican peso).

Using Excel Solver, each student prepares an employee assignment schedule for Acme Mexico City that addresses the following questions:

1. Find an optimal schedule for full-time and part-time customer service employees that minimize personnel costs. Note that the store does not pay for the lunchtime.

2. Find all implicit and explicit modeling assumptions and further provide other qualitative factors not covered by the model. (e.g., the efficiency of workers; learning curve etc.)

3. Provide your own best schedule by modifying the optimal schedule from Q1 and explain/justify why yours is better than the original optimal solution. Be creative in providing your own justification. You may link the answers in Q2 here. Please note that you have to provide the quantitative information (e.g. cost, number of employees per time, full-time and part-time etc. of your solutions). Just verbal descriptions are not accepted.

NOTE: PLEASE GIVE ME WORD FILE AS WELL AS EXCEL FILE.