The Singapore Furniture Association has engaged your team service as there is an on-going sentiment within the board that the business for furniture retailers in Singapore is declining due to the increasingly preferred way of shopping for furniture directly from overseas via online shopping platforms such as Taobao, Lazada and Shopee, where consumers can ship their furniture directly from China. Your team has been engaged to provide insights based on data. Your team is provided with the retail sales index (RSI) that the association tracks regularly. Please refer to the Excel file “GBA_Q2

Active

Compound

Quantity

Millilitre

Table 1

Question 1

As part of the nation’s vaccination programme for children, all citizens below the age of six need to be vaccinated with a cocktail mixture of Vaccine W, Vaccine X and Vaccine Y. One litre of the cocktail mixture requires a certain minimum amount of active compound alpha, beta, gamma and theta as shown in Table 1.

Table 2 shows the composition of Vaccine W, X and Y as well as cost of the vaccines. A pharmaceutical factory is considering the least cost way to produce one litre of the cocktail mixture.

	Active compound in millilitre per litre of vaccine
Vaccine	Alpha	Beta		Gamma	Theta	Cost	per
						Litre
W	60	40		20	0	60
X	40	15		40	5	50
Y	30	40		60	10	120
			Table 2

Develop a complete Linear Programming (LP) model that represents the problem above to achieve an economically optimal solution. You are not required to solve it at this stage.

(10 marks)

The chief scientist has issued a new guideline, stating that the cocktail mixture of vaccine is deemed completed as along as at least three of the active compounds are fulfilled. Implement this new guideline in your LP model in Question 1(a) to include the new information. (Hint: Please search online on “linear programming with conditional constraint” or “linear programming with binary”.

(10 marks)

Use the Excel Solver to solve the optimal solution to the problem in Question 1(b) and summarise how the cocktail mixture should be formulated using the available Vaccine W, X, and Y. Please paste here three screenshots, (1) the problem worksheet just before clicking the Solver command, (2) the Solver Parameters dialog just before clicking Solve and (3) the Answer Report created by the Solver. Please limit the answer to within three pages.

(20 marks)

Question 2

The Singapore Furniture Association has engaged your team service as there is an on-going sentiment within the board that the business for furniture retailers in Singapore is declining due to the increasingly preferred way of shopping for furniture directly from overseas via online shopping platforms such as Taobao, Lazada and Shopee, where consumers can ship their furniture directly from China. Your team has been engaged to provide insights based on data. Your team is provided with the retail sales index (RSI) that the association tracks regularly. Please refer to the Excel file “GBA_Q2_InputFile”.

Using an appropriate forecasting method, forecast the RSI from October 2021 to June 2022. You are required to provide comments on the data, justification for the method used and the essential steps in the forecasting process.

(25 marks)

Examine on your results in Question 2(a), provide the management a summary of the insight and highlight any concerns in your forecasting approach.

(35 marks)

Note: Do provide proper and adequate in-text citations and referencing to content drawn from course materials and other credible sources.