There is a wide variety of topics of laboratory works for the teacher of the discipline “Computational Methods”. It is necessary that students improve their theoretical knowledge during its implementation, show their programming skills, express creative invention and ingenuity in graphical output of results, as well as find out for themselves what practical tasks they will have to face after graduation. The authors of the article propose to familiarize with the laboratory work “Development of a DSS for processing sugar beet”, which meets all the above requirements. It considers a mathematical model of a real problem of the agro-industrial complex, which is closely related to discrete optimization. In addition, the scope of application of DSS systems now, in fact, includes most of the tasks assigned to IT services, therefore, the development of this DSS is a good practice for students in programming and designing such systems.