Mathematical Programming-Based Sales and Operations Planning at Vestel Electronics

We investigate the sales and operations planning (S&OP) process at Vestel Electronics, a major television manufacturer located in Turkey. The company has a large product portfolio because its products have many configuration options, and its product portfolio changes rapidly as a result of technological advances. Demand volatility is high, and materials procurement requires long lead times. Hence, the S&OP process is critical for efficient management of company resources and its supply chain and to ensure customer satisfaction. We devise a mathematical programming formulation for Vestel’s S&OP process and describe our experience in implementing a decision support system (DSS) based on our optimization model. We fully implemented and deployed our DSS at Vestel, which has used it every day since 2011.