Browsing by Author "Fescioglu-Unver, N."
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ArticlePublication Metadata only Capacitated strategic assortment planning under explicit demand substitution(Elsevier, 2021-11-01) Çömez-Dolgan, Nagihan; Fescioglu-Unver, N.; Cephe, E.; Şen, A.; Management Information Systems; ÇÖMEZ DOLGAN, NagihanBuyers have easier access to a variety of products with the rise of multi-channel distribution strategies and the increase in new product introductions. On the other hand, firms experience greater pressure in offering the correct product variety given that the manufacturing infrastructure often imposes physical and financial constraints in attaining variety. This study examines a firm's optimal assortment planning problem under an exogenous demand model, where each customer has a predetermined preference for each product from a potential set. Proportional demand substitutions are allowed from out-of-assortment products to those available. We show that the problem is NP-complete. We also show that an optimal assortment is composed of some number of the highest margin products, if one product having a higher margin than another implies that the former product has a lower demand rate than the latter. The firm's assortment capacity is fully utilized at the optimum if the customers’ substitution ratio does not exceed a particular threshold. We also introduce several approximate assortment policies that can be easily implemented, and test these policies through extensive numerical analyses. The results reveal that some of the policies can provide less than a 1% profit gap with an optimal solution for a 20-product set. The policy's performance highly depends on the firm's assortment capacity-to-product set size ratio. Moreover, we provide performance bounds for two of these well-performing approximate policies.ArticlePublication Metadata only Multi-plant manufacturing assortment planning in the presence of transshipments(Elsevier, 2023-11-01) Çömez-Dolgan, Nagihan; Dağ, H.; Fescioglu-Unver, N.; Şen, A.; Management Information Systems; ÇÖMEZ DOLGAN, NagihanIn this study, we consider the assortment planning problem of a manufacturing firm with multiple plants. Making a plant capable of producing a product is costly, therefore the firm cannot manufacture every product in every plant. In case a customer's order in a particular region is not available in the closest plant, another plant can ship the product using transshipment, but at an extra transportation cost. If a demanded product is not produced in any plant, substitution from first choice to a second choice is also considered, which can be either satisfied by the closest plant, or by transshipment. The problem is to jointly determine assortments in all plants such that total profit after assortment and transshipment costs is maximized. The resulting problem is complex as transshipments and substitutions are intertwined to affect assortment decisions. We show that the optimal assortments are nested, i.e., the assortment of a plant with a smaller market share is a subset of the assortment of a plant with a larger share. The common assortment of all locations is shown to be in the popular set (i.e., no leapfrogging in product popularities), and a sufficient condition on substitution rate is derived for each individual assortment to be in the popular set. We conduct an extensive numerical study to understand the effects of allowing transshipments on resulting assortments. Moreover, we introduce approximate assortment planning algorithms that benefit from the derived structural properties, which are shown to generate near-optimal assortments in a broad range of instances tested.