Demand management: The evaluation of price and due date negotiation strategies using simulation

The research considers the problem of demand management in a firm where the firm's historical delivery service level reputation influences the number of quotation requests from its potential customers. Customers have a maximum and the firm has a minimum net price to due date trade-off curve for each job. The demand management function bargains with the customer over price and promised due date. Bargaining finishes either with an agreed price and delivery date or with the customer refusing the firm's bid and placing the order elsewhere. The firm's objective is to maximize its long-term net revenue. The firm's demand management negotiation strategy guides this bidding process. The research demonstrates the use of simulation to test different demand management bidding and negotiation strategies for different market and firm scenarios. The demonstration uses 16 scenarios to test the different demand management negotiation strategies with a model of a classical job shop in a classical market. The investigation examines finite scheduling-based due date estimation methods, as well as the more traditional parameter-based methods. This demonstration shows that it is possible to test different bidding policies, using a simulation model of a firm and its customers, and to obtain usable results.