Inventory models in the mobile business environment

In this paper we investigate what impact the deployment of wireless technologies can have on a company that manufactures a durable product and customises it according to the individual wishes of its customers. We derive several models for a special case when a company representative visits customers to specify their orders. The agent sends all modifications of the order to the corporate back-end system from his mobile device via the wireless network. Only after this new information is available to the manufacturer, can he start fulfilling of the customer's order. The deployment of mobile solutions allows overlapping of the process of visiting the customers and the production process, which improves service quality and increases customer satisfaction.