Allocation of Sales Effort in the Lamp Division of the General Electric Company

One of the authors of this paper was requested by the editor of O perations R esearch to prepare a more technical presentation of a case study he had published in 1955 (Russell L. Ackoff, “The Allocation of Sales Effort,” Proceedings of the Conference on What Is Operations Research Accomplishing in Industry? Case Institute of Technology, April, 1955.). This request came shortly after the Conference on Operations-Research Education at The Johns Hopkins University in March of 1956. At this conference the need for detailed case histories, rather than highly rational reconstructions of OR projects, was recognized as serious in the field of education. Consequently, at the risk of boring professional analysts, but with the hope of assisting the novice, a detailed case history is presented here. It records the false starts, the blind alleys, and the tentativeness of the conclusions eventually reached. Not even those who worked on the project would do it over in the same way, knowing what they now know. The project raised more questions than it put to rest, but this, we believe, is the essence of scientific progress. Yet it should be pointed out, by way of anticipation, that even the tentative results were better than anything then available to management as a basis for decision making in the area involved. The results were used as recommended and the outcome that was forecast has occurred in the eighteen months during which they have been used.