Customization rule generation for electronic sales promotion system in wholesale industry

In a sales promotion task, suppliers prepare and present the sales promotion proposal plans for negotiating with retailer's buyers what commodities they should sell. For automating the sales promotion tasks, a B-to-B EC (business-to-business electronic commerce) system using a one-to-one marketing technique has been developed. In this system, a standard sales promotion proposal plan is modified with customization rules for each retailer. The customization rules vary according to the retailer's conditions. Furthermore, the effective lifetime of customization rules is very short because of the appearance of new commodities and seasonal changes. Therefore, the rules should be generated automatically. This paper proposes a customization rule generation method from sales log data by using mass customization technology. The proposed method has been applied to real log data in the wholesale industry successfully. The generated rules are installed in an experimental electronic sales promotion system tested in the Toukai area in Japan.