In pre-sell distribution, the uncertain customer demands are revealed by the company's sales representatives who visit the customers and arrange delivery quantities on the spot, prior to physical execution of deliveries. Given a periodic base-stock of a distributed product, we consider allocation of the product to the customers in two different settings: with and without utilization of mobile communication technologies. There are two performance measures considered: the customer-average fill rate, and the sales profit under service level constraints. The mobile setting is shown to enable a generally better system-wide performance, featuring the capability of inventory pooling. To observe the magnitude of this advantage we determine the optimal allocation policies by means of stochastic dynamic programming. Computational examples for selected configurations and demand distributions are presented.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)584-600
Number of pages17
JournalInternational Journal of Production Economics
Volume121
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Oct 2009
Externally publishedYes

    Research areas

  • Inventory pooling, Inventory rationing, Mobile communication technologies, Pre-sell, Stochastic programming

    Scopus subject areas

  • Business, Management and Accounting(all)
  • Economics and Econometrics
  • Management Science and Operations Research
  • Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

ID: 5384578