product has been a steady seller, and the company has been profitable. Applichem has four plants that manufacture Release-ease: Gary (Indiana, USA), Frankfurt (Germany), Sunchem (a wholly owned subsidiary in Japan), and Mexico City (Mexico). The problem here is to determine This is a classic transportation problem in operations management, which can be solved using linear programming. Step 1: Define the decision variables. Let Xij be the amount of Release-ease produced at plant i and shipped to customer j. Step 2: Formulate the objective function. The objective is to minimize total costs, which include production and shipping costs. The objective function is the sum of the product of the cost per unit produced at plant i and shipped to customer j and the decision variable Xij, summed over all i and j. Step 3: Formulate the constraints. The constraints include the capacity of each plant (the total amount produced at each plant cannot exceed its capacity) and the demand of each customer (the total amount shipped to each customer must meet its demand). Step 4: Solve the linear programming problem. This can be done