A DSS approach to managing customer enquiries for SMEs at the customer enquiry stage

A key requirement for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to remain competitive is the ability to assess incoming orders in terms of their profitability and determine the best orders that they should accept. This paper proposes a decision support system (DSS) approach that helps SMEs to make appropriate responses to customer enquiries. First, the customer enquiry and the generic processing procedure are addressed. Next, the framework of the proposed DSS approach is discussed. Four fundamental components of the framework are investigated in detail. For one specific enquiry, an available-to-promise (ATP)-based heuristic approach is developed for determining a feasible delivery date and checking its feasibility. For enquiries that are processed concurrently, an optimization model is built to evaluate them against limited ATP quantities in order to select a subset which will be fulfilled. Finally, the implementation issues for the proposed DSS are discussed. A simple application is illustrated to show how SMEs can respond effectively to customer enquiries using the proposed DSS approach.