The Application of Decision Support Systems to Shelf Space Management

According to the result of statistical analysis, the former is not significant but the latter is very significant. Moreover, the former correlation will be influenced by the organization factors, and the latter will be influenced by the implementation factors. These results can be used as guidelines for retailers to apply DSS to their decisions of shelf space management.

Next, a DSS uses experience-based or theory-based model of decision support generally. The former provides empirical data to the decision-maker with higher implementation cost, but the latter can only provide the theoretical data for reference, and both cannot provide effective support to the complicated shelf-space allocation problems. Therefore, this study also constructs a flexible decision-support model by integrating these two kinds of decision-support concepts, and use it to develop a conceptual framework of DSS system for shelf-space allocation, and a prototype system that is developed according to the framework is also introduced.