Improving promotional effectiveness through supplier-retailer collaboration

In the consumer products industry, retail chains and manufacturers run promotions to maintain consumer and brand loyalty. The two major issues in planning and executing promotions are to accurately forecast demand and to control Out-of-Stock at the shelf. This thesis addresses both these issues. At the strategic level, "Collaborative, Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment" is used to define a process for two companies to collaboratively plan and execute promotions. At an operational level, the single period multi-item newsboy concept with a budget constraint is used to define an optimization model that helps determine the right budget and order quantities for products under a promotion at a targeted service level to improve profit or sales. The concept of Supply Contracts is researched to identify some ways that can be used to optimize the whole supply chain rather than just the retailer's. The value of optimal collaboration was confirmed in the results shown by the model. When optimizing the entire chain, the maximize profit optimization model achieved combined profit improvements of 37% as compared to an actual promotion.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Authors dc:creator

• Kapur, Gautam, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Liu, Bin

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Lawrence Lapide.

• Engineering Systems Division.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/40875

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/40875