Customer-Centric Revenue Management in manufacturing - a Decision Support System

Manufacturing providers aim not only for a revenue maximizing allocation of their limited production capacity but also for the establishment of long-term customer relations. Due to long-term contracts and strategic reference customers, users of traditional revenue management systems already account for varying worthiness of clients, and intuitively ignore or override booking control suggestions, such as order’s denial or pricing level, in order not to endanger customer relations. So with a view to a holistic approach, the integration of both management concepts, each of decisive competitive impact, is advised. However, an implemented IT-system, that provides the revenue analyst with greater insights, higher accuracy, quality and trust in decision process, is still missing in manufacturing industry. This reflects the common frustration of managers and analysts in practice when dealing with conflicting ideas or theories generated by research community. We believe our prototype is the first to supply analysts with formatted and summarized information to make transparent and comprehensible control decisions, suggesting specific booking control actions based on simulation results and integrated usage of provided data. It also accounts for the strategic dimension of the problem when confronted with these partly diametric objectives of revenue vs. customer relationship management.