Caterpillar recently embarked on an ambitious program to radically change how it markets and sells key products of its Building Construction Products division (BCP). The goal was to move from a strict build-toorder strategy, in which customers selected one of millions of possible configurations, to a Lane Strategy in which the majority of their customers would choose machines from just over 100...

In order to be successful in the market it is not sufficient to attract new customers managers must concentrate on retaining existing customers implementing effective policies of customer satisfaction and loyalty. In hotel industry customer satisfaction is largely hooked upon quality of service. A management approach focused on customer satisfaction can improve customer loyalty, thus increasing...

Some recent large scale studies on residential networks (ADSL and FTTH) have provided important insights concerning the set of applications used in such networks. For instance, it is now apparent that Web based traffic is dominating again at the expense of P2P traffic in lots of countries due to the surge of HTTP streaming and possibly social networks. In this paper we confront the analysis of ...

The dissertation considers the heterogenity of firms. It consists of a theoretical and an empirical part. In the theoretical part it is examined to what extent asymmetries between customers have an impact on firm behavior. In the empirical part, the author analyzes the level of heterogeneity of firm performance within industries. Chapter 1 introduces the reader into the topic of firm heterogene...

We consider how to partition arriving customers into service groups that will be served separately , in a rst-come rst-served manner, by multi-server service systems having a provision for waiting, and how to assign an appropriate number of servers to each group. We assume that customers can be classiied upon arrival, possibly according to their service requirements. We model the congestion exp...

In this paper we consider the Vehicle Routing Problem with Hard Time Windows and Stochastic Service Times (VRPHTWSST). We can describe the problem as follows. Consider a directed graph G = (V,A) where V = {0, 1, . . . , n} is the node set, and A = {(i, j) | i, j ∈ N} is the arc set. Node 0 represents a depot where a fleet of homogeneous vehicles is initially located and Vc = {1, . . . , n} is t...

 Customer impatience (reneging) has negative impact on the performance of queueing systems. If we talk from business point of view, firms lose their potential customers due to customer impatience which affects their business as a whole. It is envisaged that if the firms employ certain customer retention strategies then there are chances that a certain fraction of impatient customers can be ret...

The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between the type of service failure, age and the customer ’ s negative emotions after a service failure; as well as the relationship between these emotions, the recovery strategies executed and service recovery satisfaction. The proposed model is tested on a sample of fi nancial services customers who suffered some type of failure. The resu...