I'm working on an assignment for school and am interested in figuring
out something that goes beyond the scope of the assignment.  The
assignment basically offers the following:

-A company is trying to forecast its supply so that it adequately meets demand.
-For every item the company has in stock but doesn't sell it loses X. 
For every item the company has demand for that it can't meet, it loses
(i.e. misses out on profit) in the amount of 3X.
-The company has a number of different styles to produce, each with an
expected demand forecast and expected demand standard deviation.
-The company does have a total capacity maximum and production
minimums for each style (i.e. no more than X of a style can be ordered
at one time).  The maximum and minimums will likely offer constraints
on production quantities.

Here's my question.  It seems to me that it shouldn't be extremely
difficult to build a mathematical model/simulation given that I know
the per unit cost of both under and oversupply, the forecast mean and
standard deviation and the production maximum and minimums.  I'm
thinking about building some type of model and allowing Excel to
randomly generate numbers (given a normal distribution and the
standard deviation numbers) to generate total costs and profitability.
 However, I'm not entirely sure.  Therefore, I'd love to get someone's
opinion who may have done something like this before:

1.  How easy or difficult is to build one of these models given a
fairly solid background in statistics and proficiency with Excel?

2.  What might be a good direction to go to get started?  Is there a
website or a book that might describe this procedure?

Please feel free to let me know if I need to clarify anything.  I
realize that I may need to given the somewhat nebulous nature of my
question.