Abstract
This case centers around the dilemma faced by the female owner of a balloon decoration business: whether to outsource transportation of balloon arrangements to third-party providers or handle the transportation of some orders in house. The case illustrates a path to answering the strategic business question through solving a sequence of vehicle routing problems (VRPs) of increasing complexity. The focus of the case is not only on solving VRPs, but also on teaching a practical framework for (1) framing a business problem as a prescriptive analytics problem; (2) researching appropriate concepts, prior publications, and tools; (3) setting up an optimization problem formulation, estimating the necessary inputs, and obtaining a solution; (4) deciding on the appropriate level of formulation complexity needed; and (5) mapping the results from the models to a response to the original business question. Realistic data and Excel models and are provided. The case is appropriate for use in courses in optimization, operations research, and business analytics at either the advanced undergraduate or master’s/MBA level. Supplemental Material: The Teaching Note and supplemental data are available at https://www.informs.org/Publications/Subscribe/Access-Restricted-Materials .
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