Abstract
Retailers face increasing competitive pressure to determine how best to deliver products purchased online to the end customer. Grocery retailers often require attended home delivery where the customer must be present to receive the delivery. For attended home delivery to function, the retailer and customer must agree on a delivery time slot that works for both parties. Using online data from a grocery retailer, we observe customer preferences for three delivery service attributes associated with each time slot: speed, precision, and timing. We define speed as the expected time between the placement of an order and its delivery, precision as the duration of the offered time slot, and timing as the availability of choices across times of the day and days of the week. We show that customers not only value speed as an attribute of delivery service but that precision and timing are also key drivers of the customer's time slot selection process. We also observe substantial customer heterogeneity in the willingness of customers to pay for time slots. Customers that differ in their loyalty to the retailer, basket value, basket size, and basket composition exhibit distinct differences in their willingness to pay. We show that retailers with the capability to tailor their time slot offerings to specific customer segments have the potential to generate approximately 9% more shipping revenue than those who cannot. Our findings inform practitioners seeking to design competitive fulfillment strategies and academics customer behavior in the attended home context.

Abstract

Abstract
In several online retail contexts, such as grocery retailing, customers have to be present at the moment of delivery, that is, an attended home delivery service is in place. This requirement adds new challenges to this channel, often leading to narrow profitability. From an operations perspective, this service is performed with the retailer offering multiple time slots for the customer to choose from. Retailers target a cost-efficient delivery process that also accounts for customers' preferences by properly managing the options to show to customers, that is, time slot management. This study analyzes a dynamic slotting problem, that is, choosing the best slots to show for each customer, which is close to many practical cases pursuing a customer service orientation. We study two new strategies to improve customer service while satisfying cost-efficiency goals: (i) enforcing a constraint on the minimum number or percentage of slots to show to customers and (ii) integrating multiple days when tackling this challenging problem. Our results show under which conditions these proposed strategies can lead to win-win situations for both customer service and profit.

Abstract
The Minimum Life on Receipt (MLOR) is a widely used rule that imposes the minimum remaining age a food product must be delivered by the producer to the retailer. In practice, this rule is set by retailers and it is fixed, around 2/3 of the age of products regardless their shelf life. In this work, we study single and two echelon make-to-stock production-inventory problems for fixed-lifetime perishables. Mixed-integer linear optimization models are developed considering the MLOR rule both as decision variable and fixed parameter. When the MLOR rule is a variable, it is considered either a sole decision of the producer or a collaborative decision between retailer and producer. The goal of this work is to compare the supply chain performance considering this innovative setting of optimal MLOR (as a variable) against the traditional setting of fixed MLOR rule. The computational results suggest that allowing flexible MLOR rules according to the shelf life of products and the operational requirements of the producer benefit both entities in the supply chain. In particular, reducing the MLOR requirement in up to 12% does not interfere substantially with the average freshness of products arriving to the retailer, but reduces extensively surplus/waste generation at the producer while keeping a small amount of waste at the retailer.

Abstract