Examples: Management

Mathematica Link for Excel easily tackles critical management problems regarding staffing, transportation and delivery. Here, a minimum-cost strategy for staffing to meet a 24-hour productivity requirement is determined—perhaps a quality-control department supervising an assembly line, or representatives for a bank's customer-service number. Each type of employee (here full-time, part-time and full-time employees working overtime) has a productivity profile (the number of inspections or phone calls they can handle every shift) and a salary amount.

From the provided input parameters, Mathematica computes the optimal number of employees and the times at which they should start work. An Excel bar chart is used to display the optimal strategy. Having linear optimization logic imbedded in a custom Mathematica function lets you optimize your worksheet with a function call. You can modify input parameters as frequently as you choose and the new optimum will be instantaneously updated—no need to run any macros.

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