Atos Inc. is an appliance manufacturer with its headquarters in Belgium. Its European market is divided into three regions: Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Southern Europe. Since its founding, the company has been operating a plant located in Belgium. Recently, it opened plants in two more locations, Montenegro and Ukraine, to accommodate growing demand for its products.

DATA IN SCREENSHOT BELOW

A table below provides production and shipping costs, annual operating costs for each plant, as well as each markets forecasted demand and each plants capacity:

You are hired as a consultant and asked to help Atos Inc. optimize their production network. Specifically, you asked to investigate three different scenarios:

1. Atos Inc.s management wonders whether they need to keep all three plants open to satisfy current demand levels. Use an appropriate model to provide a recommendation to Atos Inc and estimate overall costs.

2. The three demand regions require certain customization of Atos Inc.s products. Would it be possible to supply demand of each region from one plant? Would it lead to a better outcome than the first scenario?

3. Atos Inc, is worried about potential pushback from its union of the plant in Belgium. How does the situation described in question 1 change if Atos Inc. to ensure that its plant in Belgium cannot be closed?

In your response:

Provide a problem formulation for each scenario (advice: you can do it in an MS Word document)

Solution for each problem in Excel (advice: you can create a separate spreadsheet for each scenario in single Excel file)

Recommendation for each scenario (advice: you can provide them in the same MS Word document that you used for problem formulation)

Annual operating costs Capacity Belgium Montenegro Ukraine Demand Production + shipping costs Northern Eastern Southern Europe Europe Europe $86 $75 $85 $57 $34 $75 $53 $49 $57 29,972 15,043 20,841 33,454 42,506 43,221 $4,014,000 $2,271,000 $1,957,000 Annual operating costs Capacity Belgium Montenegro Ukraine Demand Production + shipping costs Northern Eastern Southern Europe Europe Europe $86 $75 $85 $57 $34 $75 $53 $49 $57 29,972 15,043 20,841 33,454 42,506 43,221 $4,014,000 $2,271,000 $1,957,000