Based on your read and/or additional research, what is your biggest take-a-ways from how the company uses LP in product and production planning?

MANAGEMENT SCIENCE IN ACTION VESTEL ELECTRONICS USES LINEAR PROGRAMMING FOR SALES AND OPERATIONS PLANNING* Vestel Electronics manufactures a variety of prod- of the linear programming model are how much of ucts, including LCD and LED televisions. With each product to produce/procure and how much to a single large manufacturing facility in Manisa, hold in inventory at the end of each period during Turkey, it has annual capacity of 15 million units. the planning horizon. The objective function is to Vestel's primary market is in Europe, with nearly minimize the total production and procurement 90 percent of its products sold to European cus- cost. Constraints ensure that demand is satisfied tomers. Vestel is very customer-centric and so it (all sales targets are met), resource capacities are allows mass customization of its products. Since not violated, and inventory balance equations a television is a highly customizable product, the calculate how much inventory to hold per period. number of possible combinations of attributes such In addition to more efficient and cost-effective as screen size, speaker type, remote control type production plans, the optimization has generated etc. opens the possibility of ten thousand different other benefits such as decreased planning time, versions of the product. Furthermore, Vestel allows improved planning accuracy, decreased inventory low order quantities and order changes until the levels, better data visibility, and improved data time of production. This flexibility, while fantastic standardization, and accuracy. for customer relations, leads to incredibly chal- lenging production planning problems. *Based on Z. Taskin et al., Mathematical Programming- Vestel uses a multiperiod linear programming Based Sales and Operations Planning at Vestel Electron- model to plan its production. The decision variables ics, Interfaces 45, no. 4 (July/August, 2015): 325340