Assigning Regions to Sales Representatives at Pfizer Turkey

Abstract

This case is based on a project conducted for a pharmaceutical company, Pfizer. Sales representatives of pharmaceutical companies typically visit medical doctors regularly to promote their products. There are a number of criteria that may be of interest in assigning representatives to a group of doctors: minimizing total distance traveled by representatives, balancing the workload of representatives, and minimizing the disruption in the assignments of each representative are three main concerns. In this case study, a realistic scenario is created for students to attempt to find meaningful solutions to this multiple criteria problem from practice.

The information regarding the pharmaceutical sector and the company are accurate as collected from various cited sources. The problem contains all the characteristics of the underlying problem faced by Pfizer. It has been simplified for the purpose of keeping the model size manageable as a case study and the data has been altered for reasons of confidentiality. The authors created the case material based on past collaboration with Pfizer (Batun et al. 2004). All the characters introduced throughout the case are fictional.

This case won the first prize in the 2006 INFORMS Case Competition and has been published in INFORMS Transactions on Education, 9, 70–83, 2009. It is reprinted here with permission from INFORMS. Additional teaching resources about the case are available for qualified instructors from INFORMS Transactions on Education.