Research & application · Sales planning
Connected territories.Coordinated decisions.
Bring territory design, locations, and customer-contact time into one plan.
An integrated optimization approach helps sales organizations evaluate where to base their teams, which regions they should serve, and how to allocate selling time.
01 / The planning challenge
Plan more than boundaries.
A sales territory determines which customers a representative can reach and how much time remains for selling. Territory boundaries, team size, representative locations, and available working time influence one another. Planning them together helps balance market potential, travel requirements, and the fixed costs of maintaining locations.
02 / The method
Connect geography with economic potential.
The model assigns geographic units to representatives and allocates their time using estimated relationships between customer-contact time and sales. It seeks the highest expected contribution after location costs, subject to working-time limits and geographically connected territories. This is strategic territory planning; detailed visit schedules and routes are planned separately.
03 / The development
From fast alternatives to stronger quality checks.
Early work developed fast methods for comparing alternative sales-force arrangements. Later research improved the mathematical treatment of connected territories and provided tighter bounds on the best possible result. Planners can therefore assess both a proposed arrangement and how much room for improvement remains within the model.
The evidence
Company data. Larger planning problems.
1996 · Real-company case
95 regions · 10 representatives
Using data from a northern German company serving the whole country, the study evaluated territory alignment and time allocation with representative locations held fixed. It reported about 5% higher modeled profit than the company's existing arrangement.
The paper reports a computational comparison; implementation and realized profit gains are not confirmed.
2014 · Large-scale research
More than 500 regions
A later study used German geographic and physician-count data for an illustrative medical and pharmaceutical supplier. It demonstrated high-quality solutions for large territory-planning problems, with explicit geographic connectivity and quantified solution quality.
This was a research scenario, not a documented deployment at a pharmaceutical company.
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