Embotelladoras ARCA Uses Operations Research to Improve Territory Design Plans

Embotelladoras ARCA is a Mexican company dedicated to the production, distribution, and sales of soft drink brands owned by the Coca-Cola Company, ARCA, and third parties. One of the most relevant problems the company faces is how to segment its customers into territories to accommodate the most efficient handling of marketing and distribution decisions. This territory design must also satisfy several planning requirements, such as territory compactness, connectivity, and balancing, and similarity with the existing design. Before 2009, the company planners defined these units based on their experiences, without using quantitative tools, giving more weight to the territory compactness criterion. This method of definition led to a number of undesirable issues, including highly unbalanced territories; that is, the final plans had large disparities in size with respect to both number of customers and total product demand. In this paper, we apply operations research methods to determine configurations of the territorial units that ensure territory balance with respect to both number of customers and total product demand, while complying with other important planning requirements and maximizing territory compactness. Using this methodology has resulted in significant enhancements with respect to the territory imbalance issue while maintaining the level of territory compactness. We also highlight additional benefits of this approach. Embotelladoras ARCA has adopted this proposed tool to make its design decisions.