Balancing the assignment of customer groups among employees: Zero-one goal programming and heuristic approaches

Addresses an actual problem of assigning customers to employees in a mail order firm. The management of the firm groups customers based on the first letter of the last name. To make assigning responsibility for handling customer orders easier, management specifies that no letter group can be broken up. In other words, all customers with last names begining with the same letter must be assigned to the same employee. Management also desires a fair assignment among employees. A perfectly fair assignment entails assigning the same number of customers to every employee. A lower bound on the solution to the problem is established and two approaches to the problem are developed. First, it is formulated as a zero-one goal programming problem and thus commercially available computer codes can be used to solve it. Second, a heuristic approach which assigns customers to employees based on rules similar to assembly line balancing is developed. The zero-one goal programming approach yields slightly better results. However, it requires longer computer running time.