Robust order promising with anticipated customer response

One important way to differentiate from competitors is to promise reliable delivery dates. Therefore, order promising not only aims at maximizing short-term profits, but also at achieving an acceptable degree of robustness. In capable-to-promise (CTP) approaches proposed for answering to customer order inquiries the order- and resource-related uncertainty is taken into account by several preventive measures. Up until now, the effectiveness of these measures has been proven in isolated analyses. Although they are directed to different uncertainty types it cannot be concluded that the observed impacts unfold independently. In this paper a CTP approach is presented and analyzed for the case of order- and resource-related uncertainty. Robustness is achieved by the preventive adaptation measures of capacity nesting, providing safety capacity and proposal of alternative delivery dates. Planning occurs at two stages: (1) order acceptance according to the order specifications requested by the customer or provisionally order rejection, and (2) proposal of alternative delivery dates for provisionally rejected orders. As a major extension to the current literature customers׳ response on alternative delivery dates is anticipated and considered at this stage. In contrast to currently existing approaches the suitability of this new approach, the impacts of preventive measures on profit and robustness and the interactions between the measures are systematically evaluated in a numerical analysis.