1. Why is the plant’s production load imbalanced? What countermeasures can be taken?

The plant’s imbalance is mainly due to the demand of the market of Tri Star Feeds products. The sudden change of product mix and volume forecasts at the beginning and middle of the month, plus the fact that the dealers always give the bulk of their orders in the second half of the month gives a lot of challenge to the Plant’s Production/Capacity Planning. Since the nature of their ingredients, animal feeds have a limited shelf life, which is estimated to be a maximum of four weeks after production. Maintaining large inventories of finished goods is risky.
There are lots of countermeasure strategies that can be done in Tri Star Feeds; one of them is to increase productivity of the plant in order to meet peak demand. However, increasing the productivity level would incur a large amount of investment for the company, wherein most cases, companies tend to avoid incurring a huge investment cost if there are still other methods which are more cost efficient. Also investing in an additional plant might not be the best option since the Plant Capacity Utilization is only peak during the third and fourth of the month. During the first and second half of the month, Plant Capacity utilization can’t even reach half of its potential capacity. Another countermeasure that they can do is to build up a finished goods inventory in the first half of the month in preparation for the large demand in the second half of the month. But according to the Director of Logistics Management, it will require a large storage space. Which would require for the company to rent a warehouse that is 10 km away since it is the only available near the plant. As such, they will end up incurring a lot of transportation and additional handling costs on top of the rental expense. The company will also have to tie up