How to find the lowest cost supplier-product mix? I was given a Excel spreadsheet with this table: !enter image description here The user wants to find the lowest price mix amongst the various suppliers. The user wants to constrain the number of products that each supplier gets using this table: !enter image description here Is there a tool (Excel addin) or technique (algorithm) that would help me in trying to solve this problem? _Note: My original question was posted onProgrammers._

In this case, what you have can be considered as a "network flow problem", and there is an Integrality Theorem that tells you that if the capacities and the required amounts of products are integers, the basic optimal solutions of the linear programming program will be in integers. So there's no need for integer programming here.