Customer Management

In this chapter, we introduce customer management in supply chains. First, we discuss who the customers are in a supply chain, especially from a focal firm’s perspective. Then, we introduce the importance of understanding customers, the benefits of building a customer-centric supply chain, and a five-stage process of developing a customer-centric supply chain. We also demonstrate two important methods for understanding and segmenting customers, including cohort analysis and RFM analysis. Finally, clustering algorithms that can be used to effectively classify and segment customers are introduced, such as K-means, DBSCAN, and Gaussian Mixture.