Prof. Niels Agatz - Rotterdam School of Management

Content:

New information and communication technology provides companies with fundamentally new opportunities for demand management and price-driven profit optimization. The high-level objective of this course is to familiarize students with the most important demand management and pricing concepts and model-based optimization approaches (in MS Excel) to maximize profits. Demand management activities that aim to maximize the revenues that a company can generate with a given amount of capacity are commonly referred to as revenue management. The core idea of revenue management is to exploit differences in customer value. One way to achieve this is through dynamic pricing. Another common way is to dynamically allocate capacity to different customer segments. Revenue management originated in the airline and hotel industry, but is becoming increasingly important in retailing, entertainment, broadcasting, energy, and manufacturing. Revenue management and supply chain management are complementary in their perspectives. While revenue management seeks to maximize revenues for a given supply, supply chain management starts with a given demand - or demand forecast - and seeks to optimally match it with supply. Of course, both concepts interact. To maximize profits, they must be aligned, bringing together principles from operations and marketing.