@phdthesis{Kloos2020,
  author    = {Kloos, Konstantin},
  title     = {Allocation Planning in Sales Hierarchies},
  doi       = {10.25972/OPUS-19373},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-193734},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg},
  year      = {2020},
  abstract  = {Allocation planning describes the process of allocating scarce supply to individual customers in order to prioritize demands from more important customers, i.e. because they request a higher service-level target. A common assumption across publications is that allocation planning is performed by a single planner with the ability to decide on the allocations to all customers simultaneously. In many companies, however, there does not exist such a central planner and, instead, allocation planning is a decentral and iterative process aligned with the company's multi-level hierarchical sales organization. This thesis provides a rigorous analytical and numerical analysis of allocation planning in such hierarchical settings. It studies allocation methods currently used in practice and shows that these approaches typically lead to suboptimal allocations associated with significant performance losses. Therefore, this thesis provides multiple new allocation approaches which show a much higher performance, but still are simple enough to lend themselves to practical application. The findings in this thesis can guide decision makers when to choose which allocation approach and what factors are decisive for their performance. In general, our research suggests that with a suitable hierarchical allocation approach, decision makers can expect a similar performance as under centralized planning.},
  subject      = {Supply Chain Management},
  language  = {en}
}