Jonas Hense | 26.05.2021
Prof. Dr. Alexander Hübner and Jonas Hense represented the Chair of Supply and Value Chain Management during this year’s POMS (Production and Operations Management Society) annual conference. In the retail operations track, Jonas Hense presented his mutual research with Prof. Dr. Hübner on omni-channel assortment planning. In the same track, Jonas also hosted a session on omni-channel marketing and operations.
The POMS 31st annual conference, which was postponed from last year to this year, took place over 6 days from April 30 to May 5, 2021. Given the current situation, the conference was held fully digital with the participation of leading researchers, educators and practitioners guaranteeing high quality research sessions.
Having been invited to present their research in the retail operations track, Prof. Dr. Alexander Hübner and Jonas Hense used this opportunity and showcased their latest contribution on omni-channel assortment planning. Jonas held the presentation and introduced the listeners to the tactical omni-channel assortment problem, where assortments are jointly defined for a retailer with a bricks-and-mortar store and a webshop. Their model pursues the objective of maximizing total profit of the retailer while considering various demand effects, such as stochastic demand, space-elastic demand and, most notably, substitutions within a channel and substitutions between channels in case of out-of-assortment and out-of-stock situations. The presentation also included a delineation of the specialized heuristics that has been developed to solve the problem. Jonas concluded the presentation with managerial insights that have been derived, such as that in-channel substitution has a stronger influence on a retailer’s profit compared to cross-channel substitution (i.e. buy online, pick-up in store, also called click & collect) or that considering buy online, pick-up in store substitution offers extra profits when optimizing assortments across channels.
In another session on omni-channel marketing and operations, Jonas Hense acted as session chair. He supervised the session and moderated the presentations on omni-channel demand forecasting, convergence in omni-channel retailing and discounts of omni-channel grocers for next- or two-day orders.
