Designing sales territories and pharmacy visit optimization in pharmaceuticals sector

Field sales activities involve important managerial decisions. In order to achieve an effective sales management; these activities should be carried out with lower costs (and/or higher profits) for the company and also in a fairer fashion for the sales team. In this manner, sales territories comprised of pharmacies are obtained with a binary integer programming model for a company in pharmaceuticals sector. Obtained sales territories are assigned to sales representatives by using five different mathematical models having different objective functions. While the first one of these models is a binary integer programming model, the remaining four models are formulated as goal programming models. In order to find the pharmacy set to be visited with the maximum potential profit, once again a new binary integer programming model is proposed. And finally, daily visit plans are constructed by using a goal programming model. All models in the thesis are coded in GMAS and solved with GAMS/CPLEX solver. Existing sales territories, sales territory-sales representative and visited pharmacy sets of the company are compared against suggest models' solutions with respect to various performance criteria. Obtained solutions of the suggested models are showed to be superior to the existing applications of the company.