In the subsequent consumption planning phase, if order requests differ in terms of profit margins, companies can render prioritized service in real time to their most profitable customers by consuming the reserved quotas.

Customer segments form multi-level hierarchical trees in many supply chain planning problems. Sebastian Vogel provides a comprehensive formal overview of such multi-stage customer hierarchies and characterizes the corresponding demand fulfillment problem. Here, the process of quota reservation and allocation planning usually has to be performed iteratively. This is particularly difficult for decentral planners who have only limited information transparency. A new superior allocation scheme for decentral decision makers is derived which exploits the level of customer heterogeneity in sub-trees.   Contents·         Supply Chain Planning and Demand Fulfillment·         Multi-Stage Customer Hierarchies·         Allocation Planning and Disaggregation in Customer Hierarchies·         Model Extensions: Forecast Errors and Enhanced Consumption Planning  Target Groups·         Researchers and students in the fields of production, supply chain planning,sales and distribution·         Executives in this area  The AuthorDr. Sebastian Vogel wrote his dissertation under Prof. Dr. Herbert Meyr’s supervision at the Chair of Production and Supply Chain Management at the Technische Universität Darmstadt.  The EditorsThe series Produktion und Logistik is edited by Prof. Dr. Bernhard Fleischmann, Prof. Dr. Martin Grunow, Prof. Dr. Hans-Otto Günther, Prof. Dr. Stefan Helber, Prof. Dr. Karl Inderfurth, Prof. Dr. Herbert Kopfer, Prof. Dr. Herbert Meyr, Prof. Dr. Thomas S. Spengler, Prof. Dr. Hartmut Stadtler, Prof. Dr. Horst Tempelmeier und Prof. Dr. Gerhard Wäscher.