Due date demand management: negotiating the trade-off between price and delivery

This paper considers demand management in a job shop where past delivery service level influences the number of quotations from potential customers. The firm can negotiate with customers over price and promised due date. We compare various strategies of price and due date negotiation in different market scenarios for a simple, one workstation, job shop. Results show that all due date quotation strategies benefit from negotiation. TWK or JIQ are the best due date estimation methods, depending on the market demand. The investigation shows that it can be beneficial to bargain over due date as well as price.