Case Article—Assigning Regions to Sales Representatives at Pfizer Turkey

Murat Köksalan - koksalan@ie.metu.edu.tr
Department of Industrial Engineering, Middle East Technical University, 06531 Ankara, Turkey
Sakine Batun - sab79@pitt.edu
Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15261

Abstract

Many pharmaceutical products are marketed to medical doctors by sales representatives (SRs). Each SR has a working area sales territory) covering all the doctors s/he needs to visit regularly. Designing the sales territories is an important problem in the pharmaceutical sector and it requires consideration of several conflicting criteria. This case study is based on a real-life sales territory construction problem of Pfizer Turkey, one of the leading pharmaceutical companies in Turkey. The case aims to improve the students' skills of formulating and solving integer programs, exploring the solution space and the tradeoffs between different criteria, and generating a set of promising solutions to be resented to the decision maker (DM) for final choice.

Key words
sales territory design; integer programming; multiobjective decision making

History
Received: June 2007; accepted: January 2009. This paper was with the authors 4 months for 2 revisions.

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Case Article

Teaching Note (visit the Case Teaching Notes and Other Restricted Materials page to download this PDF)

Citation Information
Köksalan, M., S. Batun. 2009. Case—Assigning regions to sales representatives at Pfizer Turkey. INFORMS Trans. Ed. 9(2) 72–76. Available online at http://ite.pubs.informs.org/.

DOI: 10.1287/ited.1090.0021