A Mathematical Programming Model for Scheduling Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives

To increase revenues, pharmaceutical companies rely heavily on their sales forces to promote new and existing drugs to physicians. Compensation for sales representatives is largely commission based. However, individual effort may not be the driving force behind compensation. Sales representatives might be unfairly rewarded only because they are assigned to physicians with high sales potential. Given a set of physicians and representatives, a mathematical program is developed to maximize profit for the pharmaceutical company, while balancing both workload and sales opportunities for representatives. The model is valuable for daily operational decisions. The methodology applies to any multi-product sales-force based industry