Multi-Objective Territory Design for Sales Managers of a Direct Sales Company
This chapter presents a case study to organize the sales territories for a company with 11 sales managers to be assigned to 111 sales coverage units in Mexico. The assignment problem is modeled as a mathematical program with two objective functions. One objective minimizes the maximum distance traveled by the manager, and the other objective minimizes the variation of the sales growth goals with respect to the national average. To solve the bi-objective non-linear mixed-integer program, a weights method is selected. Some instances are solved using commercial software with long computational times. Also, a heuristic and a metaheuristic based on simulated annealing were developed. The design of the heuristic generates good solutions for the distance objective. The metaheuristic produces better results than the heuristic, with a better balance between the objectives. The heuristic and the metaheuristic are capable of providing good results with short computational times.