The Challenge

For the initial study, we were given the locations of 2657 outlets that the sales reps needed to visit once a week for 3 minutes each. The company asked that the city’s outlets be divided up into 6 different delivery regions – one for each day of the Indian working week (Monday to Saturday).

The Solution

Cutting up regions, using the territory cutting feature, is a very simple task in MasterRouter – we tell MasterRouter how many regions we require and whether we prefer the workload to be balanced evenly across the regions or the distance between customers in a region to be minimized or something in between those two. With a click of a button, MasterRouter will have divided up all of the outlets into the six regions.

There were a few constraints that came into play. For each delivery-day region, we needed to further divide those up into sales rep territories. It was very important that these territories did not overlap as well as that the number of outlets in each sales rep’s territory were balanced.

In addition, a rep could not be expected to visit more than 50 outlets a day and the reps had 4.5 working hours a day.