For most Smaller Manufacturing Enterprises (SMEs), how to manage customer enquiries at the customer enquiry stage is of great importance to maintain the competitive advantage and secure future customer orders. A lack of co-ordination between marketing/sales and production at this stage often leads to confirmed orders being delivered later than promised and/or being produced at a loss. In the paper, the problems and the solutions for managing customer enquiries faced by many SMEs are addressed. A general process for dealing with customer enquiries at the customer enquiry stage and a corresponding DSS approach are presented in detailed. The SMEs would benefit from the proposed DSS in which the considerations of current material and production capacity are given to the customer enquiry management process. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Customer demand fulfillment is the business process within a company that determines how the customer demand is fulfilled. A rush order is the last minute customer order after the production plan of a company has been concluded. For these rush orders, appropriate and reasonable response is imperative as it could put strain on customer relationship and services. A good and positive response could help the company to build and retain its market share in today’s highly competitive markets. A model aims at decreasing the product inventory cost is proposed in this paper. In this model, the prioritized fulfillment sequence of rush customer demands can be searched in terms of the product inventory cost. The paper focuses on two main issues: the available-to-promise (ATP) based fulfillment ability and the prioritized fulfillment of customer demands. For ATP based fulfillment, a dynamic bill-of-material (BOM) is proposed to handle the complicated issues of BOM, BOM explosion and production capacity. By means of dynamic BOM, material availability as well as production capacity can be taken into consideration simultaneously and efficiently. Two methods, mathematical optimization and heuristic algorithm, are constructed and elaborated on in the second issue. The proposed model allows companies to prioritize customer rush orders in terms of product inventory cost. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)