New approach to facilities location.

This article describes a computer-oriented analytical procedure that helps management in deciding where to locate future plant and warehouse operations. The Facility Location Planner is an extension of the concepts and capabilities of linear programming, which enables a manager to determine optimum solutions to problems containing fixed costs and other nonlinear relationships. Among the advantages of this new analytical approach is that more alternatives can be examined in a shorter time than by conventional methods, which provides better decision making in terms of lower future operating costs.