DOI

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.

Язык оригиналаанглийский
Страницы (с-по)584-600
Число страниц17
ЖурналInternational Journal of Production Economics
Том121
Номер выпуска2
DOI
СостояниеОпубликовано - 1 окт 2009
Опубликовано для внешнего пользованияДа

    Предметные области Scopus

  • Бизнес, управление и бухгалтерский учет (все)
  • Экономика и эконометрия
  • Теория управления и исследование операций
  • Промышленная технология и станкостроение

ID: 5384578