Pablo was debating what to do$.$ He had been working at his family's small brewery for a number of years and was being groomed to take it over. The brewery produced eight types of beers including lagers, ales and specialty beers such as honey brewed beers, light beers, etc. Four of these brands had just recently been launched. Their most popular variety of beer was the Amigo which made up about $75\%$ of all sales. Customers included local restaurants, bars and a number of local liquor stores. Restaurants and bars would typically order by the pallet, which consisted of $24$ cases of beer. Amigo Brewing was selling about $$3$ million in beer per year with revenue of about $$20$ per case.

Currently orders would come in and a team of $2$ workers would manually load pallets as per th customer's specific requests. Cases would be organized in different sections for the workers to load. The two employees were paid $$10/$ hour and paid for $40$ hour weeks. Holidays would be staggered during slow periods so there was always someone able to handle deliveries, but staf from a different department could help out when necessary as well. The two loaders were giv the days orders and arranged the pallets in a suitable order for the delivery trucks to process.

Before Pablo lay a proposal to automate part of the shipping dock. A competitor of theirs wa selling an automated loader they were replacing, which could be used on one line to load all ne variety. It couldn't be used to select different beer varieties and would make most sense $p$ to load the Amigo Brand of beer on the pallets. With this device in place, Pablo feels he nd some cost savings through laying off one of the loaders, and the loader would also ope $t$ faster than a manual operation. The asking price for the automated loader was $$75,000$ stalled.

e company had been around for a number of years and wasn't growing particularly qui ne of the new brands that had been developed were done so in order to boost sales and ket share in the specialty markets. The Amigo brand was expected to remain consiste company was hoping to see increased sales from the other brands as their popularity

was left to analyze and make this decision on his own. Whatever he decided the $c1$ do$,$ but Pablo wanted to make sure whatever he did was in the best interest of the any.