Advanced Pharmaceuticals, Inc., is a wholesale distributor of prescription drugs to independent retail and hospital-based pharmacies. Management believes that top-notch customer representatives are the key factor in determining whether the company will be successful in the future. Customer entatives serve as the company's liais pharmacies monitor their on with customers helping stocks, delivering drugs when customer stocks run low, and providing up-to-date information on drugs from many different companies. Customer representatives must be ultra-reliable and are highly trained. Good customer representatives are hard to come by and are not easily replaced Customer representatives routinely record the amount of time they spend serving each pharmacy This time includes travel time to and from the company's central warehouse as well as time spent replenishing stocks, dealing with complaints, answering questions about drugs, informing pharmacists of the latest developments and newest products, reviewing bils, explaining procedures, and so on Some pharmacies require more hand-holding and attention than others and consequently they ore of the repres entatives' time. Recently, customer representatives have made more frequent complaints that it is impossible to do their jobs without working well beyond normal working hours. This has led to an alarming increase in the number of customer representatives quitting for jobs in other organizations. As a consequence management is considering dropping some customers to reduce the workload on customer representatives. Data concerning a representative sample of the company' customers appears belo s Providence Madison Leafcrest Hospital Jenkins Pharmacy Pharmacy Pharmacy Pharmacy Total revenues $314,430 $2,951,080 $1,499,280 $232,880 Cost of drugs sold $241,470 $2,254,480 $1,139,440 $135,920 Customer service costs $10,740 $77,400 $47,000 $9,480 Customer representative time 170 1,440 660 180 Customer service costs incl ude of the costs-other than the costs of the drugs themselves-that could be avoided by dropping the customer. These costs include the hourly wages of the customer representatives, their sales commissions, the mileage-related costs of the customer representatives company-provided vehicles, and so on