CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Abstract: The Junta Nacional de Auxilio Escolar y Becas (JUNAEB) is an agency of the government of Chile with responsibility for promoting the integration and retention of socially vulnerable children in the country?s school system. Among its services is a school meals program under which private firms bid on supply contracts for different areas of the country known as Territorial Units that are configured primarily on geographical criteria and secondarily on the numbers of meals to be served. Before 2007 these Units were defined manually and their attractiveness to potential suppliers tended to be highly variable. This led to a series of problems for the government both in the contract tender process and the service provided. The present work applies a series of operations research methodologies to determine a new configuration of the Territorial Units that ensures their attractiveness is similar and that schools in any given region of the country receive good and similar-quality meal service. This homogenization of the Units? attractiveness helps reduce the uncertainty and bankruptcy risk faced by suppliers, which benefits the entire system. One of the configuration methodologies described has been used by JUNAEB since 2007.