ABSTRACT

Bektas Nigeria Limited is an indigenous company located in Port-Harcourt Nigeria. The company engages in the production of flour aggregates. Over the years the company has been faced with un-patterned production cost which also has been incremental in nature while profits plunged. Its managers have been unable to make appropriate decisions in terms of selecting the optimal mix of key controllable variables of production which include but limited to labour, materials human and financial capital. Following this shortcomings, Bektas yearly aggregate production planning (APP) records showed that their production cost was increased to over nineteen (19000000) million Naira.

Retrieval and careful study of the company’s yearly APP data, a proposal was made to use a linear programming optimization technique to optimize the company’s APP using the matrix laboratory (MATLAB). After carrying out the optimization of Bektas APP, Result obtained showed reflected reduction in total production cost of the company to about four million and two hundred thousand (4200000) naira. Input and Output data glaringly indicated a systematic hiring and firing of workers to keep the workforce at an optimal level below 45 workers, also it is observed that zero holding of inventory beyond any month or quarter within which it was produced leads to increased profit and reduced production cost.

Data analysis was considered for various aggregate production strategies viz; level, chase and mixed strategy which resulted in production costs of 47017, 23170 and 19931600 respectively which indicated that the smallest amount from the chase strategy coupled with its flexibility of use made it a better strategy to be adopted for optimization in this study.