Evaluation of a new supply strategy based on stochastic programming for a fashion discounter

Fashion discounters face the problem of ordering the right amount of pieces in each size of a product. The product is ordered in pre-packs containing a certain size-mix of a product. For this so-called lot-type design problem, a stochastic mixed integer linear programm was developed, in which price cuts serve as recourse action for oversupply. Our goal is to answer the question, whether the resulting supply strategy leads to a supply that is significantly more consistent with the demand for sizes compared to the original manual planning. Since the total profit is influenced by too many factors unrelated to sizes (like the popularity of the product, the weather or a changing economic situation), we suggest a comparison method which excludes many outer effects by construction. We apply the method to a real-world field study: The improvements in the size distributions of the supply are significant.Comment: 5 pages, 1 tabl

An exact column-generation approach for the lot-type design problem

We consider a fashion discounter distributing its many branches with integral multiples from a set of available lot-types. For the problem of approximating the branch and size dependent demand using those lots we propose a tailored exact column generation approach assisted by fast algorithms for intrinsic subproblems, which turns out to be very efficient on our real-world instances as well as on random instances.Comment: 36 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl