A model for standardizing human decisions concerning service-contracts management |
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Authors: | R P Sundarraj |
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Institution: | (1) Information Systems, Department of Management Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Ave. West, Waterloo, ON, N2L3G1, Canada |
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Abstract: | Increased expectations of today’s customers are causing businesses to offer a variety of warranty contracts for their products.
Because of the intense customer contact that takes place during the process of supporting a contract, the planning for contracts
has to not only contend with the unpredictable and low demands of the service parts, but must also rely on human decision-making
concerning a number of subjective factors. These subjective factors, which are related to the customer, the contract and the
contracted product, have seldom been considered in the literature on inventory planning. Moreover, the evaluation of subjective
factors often becomes non-standardized and non-coordinated among the geographically dispersed decision-makers of an organization,
as was the situation with a Fortune 100 company’s case that motivated this paper. We propose a combination of a heuristic
procedure along with the Analytical Hierarchy Process technique that has not been applied in the inventory-planning setting.
We also demonstrate how a Web-based information system can be used to standardize the decision process, and discuss the implications
of the system on the motivational case. Computational results are also provided to show the effectiveness of the heuristics. |
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Keywords: | Services Contracts and warranties Electronic commerce World wide web Analytical hierarchy process Heuristic |
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