application of assignment problem in business

Assignment Problem: Meaning, Methods and Variations | Operations Research

After reading this article you will learn about:- 1. Meaning of Assignment Problem 2. Definition of Assignment Problem 3. Mathematical Formulation 4. Hungarian Method 5. Variations.

Meaning of Assignment Problem:

An assignment problem is a particular case of transportation problem where the objective is to assign a number of resources to an equal number of activities so as to minimise total cost or maximize total profit of allocation.

The problem of assignment arises because available resources such as men, machines etc. have varying degrees of efficiency for performing different activities, therefore, cost, profit or loss of performing the different activities is different.

Thus, the problem is “How should the assignments be made so as to optimize the given objective”. Some of the problem where the assignment technique may be useful are assignment of workers to machines, salesman to different sales areas.

Definition of Assignment Problem:

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Suppose there are n jobs to be performed and n persons are available for doing these jobs. Assume that each person can do each job at a term, though with varying degree of efficiency, let c ij be the cost if the i-th person is assigned to the j-th job. The problem is to find an assignment (which job should be assigned to which person one on-one basis) So that the total cost of performing all jobs is minimum, problem of this kind are known as assignment problem.

The assignment problem can be stated in the form of n x n cost matrix C real members as given in the following table:

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A Comparative Analysis of Assignment Problem

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• First Online: 06 June 2023
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• Shahriar Tanvir Alam   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0567-3381 5 ,
• Eshfar Sagor 5 ,
• Tanjeel Ahmed 5 ,
• Tabassum Haque 5 ,
• Md Shoaib Mahmud 5 ,
• Salman Ibrahim 5 ,
• Ononya Shahjahan 5 &
• Mubtasim Rubaet 5  

Part of the book series: EAI/Springer Innovations in Communication and Computing ((EAISICC))

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• International Conference on Big Data Innovation for Sustainable Cognitive Computing

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The aim of a supply chain team is to formulate a network layout that minimizes the total cost. In this research, the lowest production cost of the final product has been determined using a generalized plant location model. Furthermore, it is anticipated that units have been set up appropriately so that one unit of input from a source of supply results in one unit of output. The assignment problem is equivalent to distributing a job to the appropriate machine in order to meet customer demand. This study concentrates on reducing the cost of fulfilling the overall customer demand. Many studies have been conducted, and various algorithms have been proposed to achieve the best possible result. The purpose of this study is to present an appropriate model for exploring the solution to the assignment problem using the “Hungarian Method.” To find a feasible output of the assignment problem, this study conducted a detailed case study. The computational results indicate that the “Hungarian Method” provides an optimum solution for both balanced and unbalanced assignment problems. Moreover, decision-makers can use the study’s findings as a reference to mitigate production costs and adopt any sustainable market policy.

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Shahriar Tanvir Alam, Eshfar Sagor, Tanjeel Ahmed, Tabassum Haque, Md Shoaib Mahmud, Salman Ibrahim, Ononya Shahjahan & Mubtasim Rubaet

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Alam, S.T. et al. (2023). A Comparative Analysis of Assignment Problem. In: Haldorai, A., Ramu, A., Mohanram, S. (eds) 5th EAI International Conference on Big Data Innovation for Sustainable Cognitive Computing. BDCC 2022. EAI/Springer Innovations in Communication and Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28324-6_11

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4 Examples of Business Analytics in Action

• 15 Jan 2019

Data is a valuable resource in today’s ever-changing marketplace. For business professionals, knowing how to interpret and communicate data is an indispensable skill that can inform sound decision-making.

“The ability to bring data-driven insights into decision-making is extremely powerful—all the more so given all the companies that can’t hire enough people who have these capabilities,” says Harvard Business School Professor Jan Hammond , who teaches the online course Business Analytics . “It’s the way the world is going.”

Before taking a look at how some companies are harnessing the power of data, it’s important to have a baseline understanding of what the term “business analytics” means.

Access your free e-book today.

What Is Business Analytics?

Business analytics is the use of math and statistics to collect, analyze, and interpret data to make better business decisions.

There are four key types of business analytics: descriptive, predictive, diagnostic, and prescriptive. Descriptive analytics is the interpretation of historical data to identify trends and patterns, while predictive analytics centers on taking that information and using it to forecast future outcomes. Diagnostic analytics can be used to identify the root cause of a problem. In the case of prescriptive analytics , testing and other techniques are employed to determine which outcome will yield the best result in a given scenario.

Related : 4 Types of Data Analytics to Improve Decision-Making

Across industries, these data-driven approaches have been employed by professionals to make informed business decisions and attain organizational success.

Check out the video below to learn more about business analytics, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more explainer content!

Business Analytics vs. Data Science

It’s important to highlight the difference between business analytics and data science . While both processes use big data to solve business problems they’re separate fields.

The main goal of business analytics is to extract meaningful insights from data to guide organizational decisions, while data science is focused on turning raw data into meaningful conclusions through using algorithms and statistical models. Business analysts participate in tasks such as budgeting, forecasting, and product development, while data scientists focus on data wrangling , programming, and statistical modeling.

While they consist of different functions and processes, business analytics and data science are both vital to today’s organizations. Here are four examples of how organizations are using business analytics to their benefit.

Business Analytics Examples

According to a recent survey by McKinsey , an increasing share of organizations report using analytics to generate growth. Here’s a look at how four companies are aligning with that trend and applying data insights to their decision-making processes.

1. Improving Productivity and Collaboration at Microsoft

At technology giant Microsoft , collaboration is key to a productive, innovative work environment. Following a 2015 move of its engineering group's offices, the company sought to understand how fostering face-to-face interactions among staff could boost employee performance and save money.

Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics team hypothesized that moving the 1,200-person group from five buildings to four could improve collaboration by increasing the number of employees per building and reducing the distance that staff needed to travel for meetings. This assumption was partially based on an earlier study by Microsoft , which found that people are more likely to collaborate when they’re more closely located to one another.

In an article for the Harvard Business Review , the company’s analytics team shared the outcomes they observed as a result of the relocation. Through looking at metadata attached to employee calendars, the team found that the move resulted in a 46 percent decrease in meeting travel time. This translated into a combined 100 hours saved per week across all relocated staff members and an estimated savings of $520,000 per year in employee time.

The results also showed that teams were meeting more often due to being in closer proximity, with the average number of weekly meetings per person increasing from 14 to 18. In addition, the average duration of meetings slightly declined, from 0.85 hours to 0.77 hours. These findings signaled that the relocation both improved collaboration among employees and increased operational efficiency.

For Microsoft, the insights gleaned from this analysis underscored the importance of in-person interactions and helped the company understand how thoughtful planning of employee workspaces could lead to significant time and cost savings.

2. Enhancing Customer Support at Uber

Ensuring a quality user experience is a top priority for ride-hailing company Uber. To streamline its customer service capabilities, the company developed a Customer Obsession Ticket Assistant (COTA) in early 2018—a tool that uses machine learning and natural language processing to help agents improve their speed and accuracy when responding to support tickets.

COTA’s implementation delivered positive results. The tool reduced ticket resolution time by 10 percent, and its success prompted the Uber Engineering team to explore how it could be improved.

For the second iteration of the product, COTA v2, the team focused on integrating a deep learning architecture that could scale as the company grew. Before rolling out the update, Uber turned to A/B testing —a method of comparing the outcomes of two different choices (in this case, COTA v1 and COTA v2)—to validate the upgraded tool’s performance.

Preceding the A/B test was an A/A test, during which both a control group and a treatment group used the first version of COTA for one week. The treatment group was then given access to COTA v2 to kick off the A/B testing phase, which lasted for one month.

At the conclusion of testing, it was found that there was a nearly seven percent relative reduction in average handle time per ticket for the treatment group during the A/B phase, indicating that the use of COTA v2 led to faster service and more accurate resolution recommendations. The results also showed that customer satisfaction scores slightly improved as a result of using COTA v2.

With the use of A/B testing, Uber determined that implementing COTA v2 would not only improve customer service, but save millions of dollars by streamlining its ticket resolution process.

Related : How to Analyze a Dataset: 6 Steps

3. Forecasting Orders and Recipes at Blue Apron

For meal kit delivery service Blue Apron, understanding customer behavior and preferences is vitally important to its success. Each week, the company presents subscribers with a fixed menu of meals available for purchase and employs predictive analytics to forecast demand , with the aim of using data to avoid product spoilage and fulfill orders.

To arrive at these predictions, Blue Apron uses algorithms that take several variables into account, which typically fall into three categories: customer-related features, recipe-related features, and seasonality features. Customer-related features describe historical data that depicts a given user’s order frequency, while recipe-related features focus on a subscriber’s past recipe preferences, allowing the company to infer which upcoming meals they’re likely to order. In the case of seasonality features, purchasing patterns are examined to determine when order rates may be higher or lower, depending on the time of year.

Through regression analysis—a statistical method used to examine the relationship between variables—Blue Apron’s engineering team has successfully measured the precision of its forecasting models. The team reports that, overall, the root-mean-square error—the difference between predicted and observed values—of their projection of future orders is consistently less than six percent, indicating a high level of forecasting accuracy.

By employing predictive analytics to better understand customers, Blue Apron has improved its user experience, identified how subscriber tastes change over time, and recognized how shifting preferences are impacted by recipe offerings.

Related : 5 Business Analytics Skills for Professionals

4. Targeting Consumers at PepsiCo

Consumers are crucial to the success of multinational food and beverage company PepsiCo. The company supplies retailers in more than 200 countries worldwide , serving a billion customers every day. To ensure the right quantities and types of products are available to consumers in certain locations, PepsiCo uses big data and predictive analytics.

PepsiCo created a cloud-based data and analytics platform called Pep Worx to make more informed decisions regarding product merchandising. With Pep Worx, the company identifies shoppers in the United States who are likely to be highly interested in a specific PepsiCo brand or product.

For example, Pep Worx enabled PepsiCo to distinguish 24 million households from its dataset of 110 million US households that would be most likely to be interested in Quaker Overnight Oats. The company then identified specific retailers that these households might shop at and targeted their unique audiences. Ultimately, these customers drove 80 percent of the product’s sales growth in its first 12 months after launch.

PepsiCo’s analysis of consumer data is a prime example of how data-driven decision-making can help today’s organizations maximize profits.

Developing a Data Mindset

As these companies illustrate, analytics can be a powerful tool for organizations seeking to grow and improve their services and operations. At the individual level, a deep understanding of data can not only lead to better decision-making, but career advancement and recognition in the workplace.

“Using data analytics is a very effective way to have influence in an organization,” Hammond says . “If you’re able to go into a meeting, and other people have opinions, but you have data to support your arguments and your recommendations, you’re going to be influential.”

Do you want to leverage the power of data within your organization? Explore Business Analytics —one of our online business essentials courses —to learn how to use data analysis to solve business problems.

This post was updated on March 24, 2023. It was originally published on January 15, 2019.

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How MSNBC’s Leftward Tilt Delivers Ratings, and Complications

NBC’s leaders have been forced to grapple with how to square its cable news network’s embrace of progressive politics with the company’s straight-news operation.

By Jim Rutenberg and Michael M. Grynbaum

MSNBC placed a big bet on becoming comfort TV for liberals. Then it doubled down.

Time slots on the cable network once devoted to news programming are now occupied by Trump-bashing opinion hosts. The channel has become a landing spot for high-profile alumni of President Biden’s administration like Jen Psaki, who went from hosting White House press briefings to hosting her own show. On Super Tuesday, when producers aired a portion of a live speech by former President Donald J. Trump, Rachel Maddow chastised her bosses on the air.

The moves have been a hit with viewers. MSNBC has leapfrogged past its erstwhile rival CNN in the ratings and has seen viewership rise over the past year, securing second place in cable news behind the perennial leader, Fox News.

But MSNBC’s success has had unintended consequences for its parent company, NBC, an original Big Three broadcaster that still strives to appeal to a mass American audience.

NBC’s traditional political journalists have cycled between rancor and resignation that the cable network’s partisanship — a regular target of Mr. Trump — will color perceptions of their straight news reporting. Local NBC stations between the coasts have demanded, again and again, that executives in New York do more to preserve NBC’s nonpartisan brand, lest MSNBC’s blue-state bent alienate their red-state viewers.

Even Comcast, NBC’s corporate owner, which is loath to intervene in news coverage, took the rare step of conveying its concern to MSNBC’s leaders when some hosts and guests criticized Israel as the Hamas attack was unfolding on Oct. 7, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions. An abrupt course correction to that coverage followed.

This account of the tensions roiling NBC and its corporate overseers is based on interviews with more than two dozen people with knowledge of the company’s inner workings, almost all of whom insisted on anonymity to share details of internal discussions.

NBC declined to make its top executives available for interviews. The chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group, Cesar Conde, has said he wants his division — which encompasses MSNBC, CNBC, a digital streaming service, Telemundo and journalistic stalwarts like “Nightly News,” “Meet the Press” and “Today” — to be a big tent.

Yet his recent efforts to include more conservative voices on the airwaves generated newsroom suspicion and ultimately led to an embarrassing rebellion over the hiring of Ronna McDaniel, a former Republican Party chair who aided Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss.

MSNBC hosts, for their part, view their role in the political debate as more important than ever. They dismiss the accusation that MSNBC is a “Fox News for Democrats” and say their message — that Mr. Trump’s candidacy represents a unique and clear threat to democracy — is an urgent one for the electorate to hear.

And executives inside NBC’s corporate suites at Rockefeller Center say they are confident that viewers know the differences between the company’s various news brands. Any related challenges, they argue, are of a high-class sort — because their cable channels give NBC an advantage in relevance and revenue over its original Big Three competitors, ABC and CBS, which have no cable presence.

“Our strategy is built on our distinct, complementary brands including NBC News, CNBC, NBC News Now, MSNBC and Telemundo,” the NBCUniversal News Group said in a statement. “That has driven our performance as the nation’s leading news organization with the largest reach.” (Comcast does not disclose the news division’s earnings in its reports to Wall Street.)

The tensions inside NBC are, in some ways, a microcosm of the challenges facing many traditional news organizations as the country hurtles toward a tense presidential election: how to maintain trust and present neutral, fact-based reporting in a fractionalized era when partisanship carries vast financial and cultural rewards.

But the company’s challenge is also unique. It must juggle a broadcast news operation bound by traditional standards of impartiality and a cable channel increasingly bound by the partisan preferences of an intensely loyal viewership. How NBC navigates these dueling imperatives will have important implications for Comcast, a Philadelphia-based conglomerate known for its aversion to the political spotlight.

It will also have consequences for coverage of the presidential campaign. Where MSNBC’s cable news opinion-makers sustain and galvanize the Democratic faithful, the NBC broadcast network reaches millions of the potentially persuadable voters critical to both parties, which have sought to turn NBC’s internal tensions to their own advantage.

Left, Right, Left

MSNBC has caused corporate headaches since its inception.

NBC formed the channel as a joint venture with Microsoft in 1996 with the hope that it would thrust “all the value of NBC News into the cable world,” as Tom Rogers, a former NBC executive who helped found the cable network, described it in an interview.

But critics mocked the new 24-hour channel for its informal approach to news, mixing NBC’s biggest stars with younger personalities on a set reminiscent of Central Perk on “Friends.” It was almost immediately outflanked by Fox News, which followed MSNBC to market that same year and rose to the top of the cable news ratings as the first 24-hour TV channel with an overt political appeal.

MSNBC struggled with its identity. It moved to the left ahead of the Iraq war — and later moved right by hiring new hosts like the former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough. Soon it shifted leftward again, as the host Keith Olbermann hit a nerve with his strident anti-Bush — and often anti-Fox — commentary.

But when Andrew Lack, a veteran producer, took over NBC’s news division in 2015, he decided the channel needed to tone down its partisan image. Under Mr. Lack — who oversaw MSNBC’s creation in an earlier NBC stint — the cable network bumped the Rev. Al Sharpton from the weekday schedule, hired the former Fox anchor Greta Van Susteren and added more straightforward news programs, including a daily version of “Meet the Press,” NBC’s flagship political show, with Chuck Todd.

Mr. Todd was game — but would come to believe that his MSNBC duties ultimately hurt the “Meet the Press” franchise, several people at NBC said in interviews. The daily version of the show fell increasingly out of step with MSNBC’s partisan slant even as Republicans used its association with the liberal cable network to deny interview requests from the flagship Sunday edition of “Meet the Press.”

Then, Mr. Trump’s ascent shocked the Democratic base and spiked viewership of Ms. Maddow and other left-leaning hosts, whose programs became a kind of televised safe space. MSNBC’s ratings surged .

Conde Faces the Messiness

Mr. Conde succeeded Mr. Lack in spring 2020. A Wharton-trained business executive who sits on the boards of Walmart and PepsiCo, he came up through the corporate side of news, having led a turnaround at Telemundo after serving as the president of Univision Networks. Accordingly, Mr. Conde was expected to impose a more disciplined and neater corporate sensibility to the division.

He was almost immediately confronted by the messiness he had inherited.

Within a few weeks of Mr. Conde’s ascension, Mr. Trump attacked NBC when it announced the hiring of a new contributor: Lisa Page, a former F.B.I. lawyer who became a lightning rod on the right for her role in the investigation into his campaign ties to Russia. After an initial MSNBC appearance she did not show up again.

A few months later, NBC faced criticism from the other direction when it booked Mr. Trump for a prime-time interview on the night of a presidential debate that he had boycotted. (Mr. Biden was appearing at the same time on ABC.) Ms. Maddow chastised her bosses about it on the air.

That sort of partisan tumult has often riled another important constituency for Mr. Conde: NBC’s affiliated regional stations, which the company relies on to carry its major news programs to markets throughout the country.

The stations tend to be deeply embedded — and deeply trusted — in their communities. Many of them operate in red states or counties and chafed whenever MSNBC, which Mr. Trump regularly calls “MSDNC,” drew conservative ire.

Over the years the affiliates, many of which would have been thrilled to see MSNBC’s leftward tilt abandoned entirely, increasingly urged NBC executives to better distinguish its content from the NBC journalism like “Today” and “Nightly News” that they carried on their stations.

At one point after Mr. Conde took over, executives talked about the possibility of doubling down on partisanship and stripping MSNBC of news altogether, defining it as a pure opinion channel. The company would use the new NBC News Now streaming service, started under Noah Oppenheim when he was NBC News president, for 24-hour news, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.

That idea fizzled. Mr. Conde was not prepared to entirely abandon news, but he began to better distinguish the various parts of his news division — which effectively moved MSNBC and NBC News further apart.

In the Lack era, Mr. Oppenheim of NBC News and Phil Griffin, the longtime chief of MSNBC, often worked closely as they managed a collection of stars who worked for both networks, like Mr. Todd, Craig Melvin and Hallie Jackson.

Creating more distance between the cable and broadcast outlets, Mr. Conde and Mr. Griffin’s successor, Rashida Jones, moved Mr. Todd, Ms. Jackson and Mr. Melvin off MSNBC to work exclusively at NBC News and NBC News Now. MSNBC’s daytime block of hard news shrank to six hours from eight, as the cable network extended by an hour each two opinion shows with loyal followings: “Morning Joe” featuring Mr. Scarborough and his wife Mika Brzezinski, and “Deadline: White House” with Nicolle Wallace as host.

Nothing did more to signal that MSNBC was more tightly embracing its partisan direction than Ms. Jones’s decision to hire Ms. Psaki and another Biden aide, Symone D. Sanders, straight from the White House.

It was the kind of revolving-door hiring that liberal pundits used to criticize when it happened with Fox News and the Trump administration.

It also created an awkward situation for the NBC News White House team, which was caught off guard when word that Ms. Psaki was in talks for the job leaked while she was still serving as White House press secretary.

A tense, televised confrontation followed in the White House briefing room when Kristen Welker, then NBC News’s co-chief White House correspondent, asked her future colleague: “How is it ethical to have these conversations with media outlets while you continue to have a job standing behind that podium?”

Chasing a Broad Appeal

At the same time, NBC News was going through its own changes.

Early last year, Mr. Oppenheim left his post running NBC News, and Mr. Conde split his job in three. In a jigsaw-like structure, one executive now oversaw “Today,” another “Nightly News” and NBC News Now, and a third “Meet the Press,” “Dateline” and news coverage across numerous shows and platforms.

Mr. Conde said the new setup would provide “growth opportunities,” with each show acting like its own megafranchise. “Today,” for instance, includes an e-commerce business and online sites dedicated to cooking, wellness and books.

He gave his deputies another brief: making additional efforts to ensure that news coverage reflected a wider range of political viewpoints.

Mr. Conde wanted to get Republicans back onto shows.

That was in line with an industrywide recalibration. After four years of combat between the press and Mr. Trump, media companies have sought better ways to reach Trump supporters who feel alienated from mainstream news. Television executives were also concerned that Republican elected officials were shunning their shows in favor of the congenial confines of right-wing media.

It was especially thorny for NBC, as Mr. Trump continued to yoke NBC News to MSNBC while accusing them, along with Comcast, of committing “Country Threatening Treason.”

A chance for a fresh start seemed to come last September when Ms. Welker succeeded Mr. Todd as the moderator of “Meet the Press.”

According to several people with knowledge of the internal discussions, Mr. Conde and Ms. Welker agreed that she should make booking both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden for interviews a priority. Mr. Biden declined; Mr. Trump accepted.

But when Mr. Conde said she should schedule the Trump interview for her debut episode, Ms. Welker disagreed. Questioning the mendacious former president can be a high-wire act for even the most experienced TV interviewers, and Ms. Welker did not think it was a wise way to introduce herself to viewers. She acquiesced only after coaxing from Mr. Conde and several of his deputies.

Ms. Welker worked to fact-check Mr. Trump in real time while also eliciting an admission that he ignored his own campaign lawyers when they told him there was no evidence the 2020 presidential election results were rigged. Mr. Trump steamrolled ahead with a litany of lies nonetheless. The interview was panned on social media — complete with a “#boycottmeetthepress” campaign — but was deemed a success by Mr. Conde.

Mr. Conde and Rebecca Blumenstein, a former editor at The New York Times whom Mr. Conde hired as one of his top deputies, also worked aggressively to secure a Republican primary debate in fall 2023, pitching Ms. McDaniel and other Republican officials in person.

They succeeded, but only after accepting terms that unsettled some journalists within the company. NBC agreed to include a moderator from a right-wing media company, Salem Radio, and stream the debate live on Rumble, a video site that frequently hosts pro-Nazi and other extremist content. (NBC executives have defended the decision, noting that Rumble was already the party’s official streamer and had no editorial input.)

The debate received good marks in the press. And in general, red-state affiliates felt that Mr. Conde was doing a better job of bringing balance to NBC News, according to an executive at one company that owns affiliates.

Reverberations Continue

Each network was now set on its own distinct course: MSNBC toward more partisan and progressive opinion, and NBC News toward Mr. Conde’s commitment to “presenting our audiences with a widely diverse set of viewpoints and experiences,” as he put it.

But each tripped over the limits of its approach in an election landscape already littered with ideological tripwires.

When Hamas staged its terror attack against Israel on Oct. 7, MSNBC mixed breaking news of the attacks with discussions about the historical backdrop of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The coverage reflected views on the left — and presaged the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that would soon grow in number — but it struck many others as discordant, or even offensive, given that the violence was still coming into view.

“I love this network, but I’ve got to ask: Who’s writing your scripts? Hamas?” Jonathan Greenblatt, the Anti-Defamation League chief executive, asked two days later on “Morning Joe.”

Some of the blowback came from within.

In a call with Mr. Conde, Michael Cavanagh, the president of Comcast, who oversees NBC, shared concerns about that initial coverage, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions. Mr. Conde harbored the same concerns, according to a person briefed on their conversation, and he directed MSNBC to be more circumspect and to focus on facts, not opinions, in those initial days.

Five months later, Mr. Conde thought he had achieved a milestone at NBC News in his efforts to integrate right-wing perspectives into its programming. At the recommendation of Ms. Blumenstein and Carrie Budoff Brown, who oversees political coverage, Mr. Conde hired Ms. McDaniel, the former Republican Party chair, as a contributor who could offer on-air commentary.

If the hiring was in service of Mr. Conde’s goal of adding balance, it came as an unwelcome surprise to NBC’s ranks of correspondents, hosts and anchors. Ms. Welker had booked Ms. McDaniel for her next episode of “Meet the Press” — as a guest, not as a colleague. In the interview, she grilled Ms. McDaniel about her role in Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election result, actions that many at NBC and MSNBC viewed as disqualifying for a job there.

Mr. Todd, appearing as a guest on that day’s episode, unleashed a live, on-air denunciation of his bosses after the interview that left the control room in stunned silence. His rebellion carried over the next day on MSNBC, from “Morning Joe” up through “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Under pressure, Mr. Conde broke the deal with Ms. McDaniel, a move that only served to upset the Republicans he was trying to attract.

In the aftermath, NBC’s public stumble turned into a point of contention on the presidential campaign trail. The Republican Party said it was weighing an attempt to restrict NBC News at this summer’s convention, while Mr. Trump yet again bashed “Fake News NBC.”

Aides to Mr. Biden were also perturbed about the McDaniel hire, viewing it as part of a broader attempt by NBC News to overcompensate for MSNBC’s decidedly pro-Biden stance. In private conversations with NBC correspondents, Biden aides have argued that “Nightly News,” whose huge audience is of critical political importance to the campaign, was taking it easy on Mr. Trump and treating Mr. Biden too harshly.

Executives at NBC dismissed these complaints, saying the partisan brickbats simply come with the territory. They believe that each campaign will use anything at its disposal to pressure news organizations for more favorable coverage.

The company pointed to comments made by Mr. Conde after the McDaniel imbroglio: “We will redouble our efforts to seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum.” It also shared data intended to show strong performance across its cable, broadcast and online operations.

The message was clear. Regardless of any turbulence, NBC has no plans to change course.

Jim Rutenberg is a writer at large for The Times and The New York Times Magazine and writes most often about media and politics. More about Jim Rutenberg

Michael M. Grynbaum writes about the intersection of media, politics and culture. He has been a media correspondent at The Times since 2016. More about Michael M. Grynbaum

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Update 24.1 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (on-premises) 2024 Release Wave 1 (Application Build 24.1.19498, Platform Build 24.0.19487)

This update replaces previously released updates. You should always install the latest update.

After you install this hotfix, you might have to update your license to gain access to new objects that are included in this or a previous update. (This applies only to customer licenses.)

For a list of updates that were released for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Release Wave 1, see  released updates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Release Wave 1 . Updates are intended for new and existing customers who are running Microsoft Dynamics Released Updates for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Release Wave 1.

We recommend that you contact your Microsoft Dynamics Partner before you install hotfixes or updates. It is important to verify that your environment is compatible with the hotfixes or updates that will be installed. A hotfix or update may cause interoperability issues with customizations and third-party products that work together with your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central solution.

Problems that are resolved in this update

The following problems are resolved in this update.

Platform hotfixes

Application hotfixes

Local application hotfixes  

CA - Canada

MX - Mexico

NA - North America

NL - Netherlands

SE - Sweden

US - United States

Regulatory features

Local regulatory features

How to obtain the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Release Wave 1 files

This update is available for manual download and installation from the Microsoft Download Center.

Update 24.1 for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Release Wave 1

Which hotfix package to download

This update has multiple hotfix packages. Select and download one of the following packages depending on the country version of your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 database.

How to install a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises 2024 Release Wave 1 update

See  How to install a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Release Wave 1 update .

Prerequisites

You must have Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Release Wave 1 installed to apply this hotfix.

More information

See more information about  software update terminology  and  Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Release Wave 1 .

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section. 

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