论文标题
计划对现场销售部队的盈利之旅：销售分析和数学优化的统一观点
Planning profitable tours for field sales forces: A unified view on sales analytics and mathematical optimization
论文作者
论文摘要
现场销售力量在直接营销中起着重要的作用，尤其是对于在企业对企业背景下提供复杂产品，服务或解决方案的公司。运营计划中销售代表的一项关键任务是在接下来的几天内选择最有前途的客户。在操作范围内，销售代表的关键任务是在接下来的几天内选择最有前途的客户。在此客户选择阶段，有一组强烈的评分方法可以预测或近似预期响应。但是，在现场销售部队的情况下，最终的客户选择与旅游计划决策密切相关。为此，我们将盈利销售代表问题的变体形式化为多个周期团队的培训问题，从而为客户评分和旅游计划阶段提供了统一的看法。在一项关于零售行业现实世界实例的广泛计算研究中，我们系统地研究了聚合水平的影响以及通过评分方法提供的信息内容以及所提出模型对预测错误的敏感性。我们表明，选择客户评分和旅行计划变体取决于可用数据。此外，我们可以在数据获取和评分阶段努力努力，以获得更好的运营旅行。
Field sales forces play an important role in direct marketing, especially for companies offering complex products, services, or solutions in the business-to-business context. A key task of sales representatives in operational planning is to select the most promising customers to visit within the next days. On an operative horizon, a key task for sales representatives is to select the most promising customers to visit within the next days. A strongly varying set of scoring methods predicting or approximating the expected response exists for this customer selection phase. However, in the case of field sales forces, the final customer selection is strongly interrelated to the tour planning decisions. To this end, we formalize variants of the profitable sales representatives tour problem as a multi-period team orienteering problem, thereby providing a unified view on the customer scoring and the tour planning phase. In an extensive computational study on real-world instances from the retail industry, we systematically examine the impact of the aggregation level and the content of information provided by a scoring method and the sensitivity of the proposed models concerning prediction errors. We show that the selection of a customer scoring and tour planning variant depends on the available data. Furthermore, we work out where to put effort in the data acquisition and scoring phase to get better operational tours.
