1. What motivations typically cause firms to initiate a facilities location or relocation project?(2 Marks)
2. If you could locate your new software development company anywhere in the world, which place would you choose, and why? (2 Marks)
3. How do facility location decisions differ for service facilities and manufacturing plants?(2 Marks)
4. What is the major difference between a warehouse and a distribution center?(2 Marks)
5. As a facility location consultant, would you advise a client wanting to locate a retail service facility differently than you would advise a client wanting to locate an on-line stock trading operation? Explain. (2 Marks)
6. Logistics Consultants Inc. (LCI) provides various logistics analysis services to other firms, including facility location decisions. They have just completed a project for a major customer, but on the eve of their presentation they discovered a computer malfunction partially deleted some of their data. One file that was impacted contains the final factor rating results. Following are the partial results they were able to recover. As you’ll notice, some ratings are missing. (2 Marks)
If you were the project manager for LCI, what would you do given that they you missing some crucial data?
7. Santa Cruz Bottling is a manufacturer of organic soft drinks on the coast of central California. Its products are enjoying a growing reputation and increased demand through- out the American Southwest. Because of the high cost of transporting soft drinks, it is considering a new plant to serve the states of New Mexico and Arizona. A key concern in its search for a new location is the resultant transportation costs to serve its key markets. Following is a list of cities where its main wholesale customers are located, along with estimated annual demand in cases of product for each.
City x-Coordinate y-Coordinate Number of CasesPhoenix 250 250 25,000Tucson 350 125 20,000Albuquerque 800 450 28,000Santa Fe 850 520 17,000
a. Use the centroid method to recommend a location for the new bottling plant. Round your coordinates to one decimal place. (2 Marks)b. Do you have any concerns about the result? How would you deal with them? (2 Marks)
8. Rent’R Cars is a multisite car rental company in the city. It is trying out a new “return the car to the location most convenient for you” policy to improve customer service. But this means that the company has to constantly move cars around the city to maintain required levels of vehicle availability. The supply and demand for economy cars, and the total cost of moving these vehicles between sites, are shown below.
a. Find the solution that minimizes moving costs using Microsoft Excel. (3 Marks)b. What would you have to do to the costs to assure that A always sends a car to D as part of the optimal solution (1 Mark)