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A Sales Support System for Agents of the Machine Tool Industry

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 International Journal of Electronic Business Management, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 179-187 (2004) 179

A SALES SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR AGENTS OF THE

MACHINE TOOL INDUSTRY
Jen-Teng Tsai1, Wen-Chih Chiou2*, Shui-Shun Lin2, Zeng-Xiang Tsai1 and Chyuan Perng1
1
Department of Industrial Engineering and Enterprise Information
Tunghai University
2
Department of Business Administration
National Chinyi Institute of Technology
Taichung (411), Taiwan

ABTRACT
Industrial countries regard the machine tool industry as strategic industry, and ensure its
crucial role among industries by tremendous government supports. Nevertheless, due to the
special characteristics of industrial products, such as marketing through regional agencies,
less transaction number with higher amounts, longer purchase cycle, and various product
models, the application of data mining to industrial products is relatively less. Note
worthily, when a customer purchase machine tools through regional agents, he or she
usually purchases special accessories for coupling with purchased machines. Most of the
salesperson at regional agents recommends special accessories to customers by judging the
machine type depending on their experience. That often incurs the loss of extra sales, or the
delay in fulfilling orders. The back order operation brings customer complaint as well. This
research not only aims to applying the CRoss Industry Standard Process for Data Ming
(CRIPS-DM) to find out association rules which is helpful to make decision, but also to
integrate association rules and construct support system to assist regional agents’
salespersons when they make recommendation decision. The results of this research can be
used to motivate more data mining researches or applications focus on industrial related
product.

Keywords: Machine Tool Industry, Data Mining, Shopping Basket Analysis

1. INTRODUCTION estimated response of direct mails marketing. Most of

* them are applied to the retailing, finance, insurance,
With the prosperous application of electronic
commerce, an enterprise may accumulate mass of
transaction data via recording purchasing information
from consumers’ on-line transaction. If the enterprise
effectively analyzes the collected information, and
recommends individualized products or services to
customers on the basis of consumer’s purchasing
behavior, the customer relationships can be improved
and the competitive advantages can be strengthened
[13].
Data mining is known to be capable of
exploring and analyzing large quantity of data by
automatic or semi-automatic methods. It increasingly
draws attention both from the research community
and enterprises nowadays. Data mining has been
adopted by various industries. The industrial
applications of data mining technology include
mainly cross analysis of sales, analysis of the
customer lose rate, market segmentation, and
* of products. Note worthily, when a customer
Corresponding author: chiouwc@ncit.edu.tw
and telecommunication industries, which offer
consuming products or services [3,4]. That’s because
the transactions in these industries are large, as well
as high frequencies of repeated purchases and more
diversified patterns of products. The application of
data mining techniques in these industries is
relatively effective and impressive. Nevertheless, the
situation is quite different for machine tool industry.
Due to the special characteristics of industrial
products, such as marketing through regional
agencies, less transaction number with higher
amounts, longer purchase cycle, and various product
models, the application of data mining to industrial
products is relatively less.
Industrial countries regard the machine tool
industry as strategic industry, and ensure its crucial
role among industries by tremendous government
supports [14]. In the machine tool industry, its
characteristics include longer production time, larger
amount of parts, higher unit price, and higher degree
of customization with less quantity and more patterns
180 International Journal of Electronic Business Management, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2004)

purchase machine tools through regional agents, he or
she usually purchases special accessories for coupling
with purchased machines. This is due to the
consideration of processing accuracy and/or cutting
rate, and to fulfill the requirement of environmental
protection and industrial safety. The regional agents
will also take advantage of the assortment of special
accessories to conduct non-price competition and
differential promotions. Most of the salesperson at
regional agents recommends special accessories to
customers by judging the machine type and time
depending on their experience. That often incurs the
loss of extra sales, or the delay in fulfilling orders.
The back order operation brings customer complaint
as well. If we could take advantage of data mining
techniques to analyze customer’s behaviors of
purchasing machines and special accessories (such as
the relationship between purpose of machine and
responding special accessories) which customers
have bought to help regional agents’ salesperson to
make recommendation decision, it will reduce
unnecessary inventory cost for the company, shorten
delivery period and bring fruits of “win-win” for both
parties.
Based on the above mentioned viewpoints, this
article is trying to apply data mining technology to
assist machine tool manufacturers’ agents in the
recommendation of special accessories. The
objectives of this research includes: (1) Applying the
CRoss Industry Standard Process for Data Ming
(CRIPS-DM) to find out association rules which is
helpful to make decision; (2) Integrating association
rules and constructing prototype system to assist
regional agents’ salespersons when they make
recommendation decision.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
We discuss related characteristics of the
machine tools industry and the data mining
technology below:
2.1 Recommendation of Machine Tools and
Special Accessories
For the sales of machine tools and special
accessories, a quotation given to a customer should
include three areas as shown in table 1: (1) the
description of items and specifications of machines;
(2) standard accessories (usually they are free
attachments); and (3) special accessories (for
customer’s optional purchases). The items of special
accessories include company’s existing accessory
products (the number of accessory items ranges from
over 10 to over 40, depending on the types of
machines). If existing accessories could not meet
special demands from customers, then the
salesperson may request the development of new
special accessories. After the machine tool
manufacturer evaluated the feasibility, the new
special accessories will be produced and delivered to
the customer and added into the list of new special
accessories.
For the regional agents of machine tools, they
often conduct non-price competitions and differential
promotions with standard accessories and special
accessories to promote their machines. Also, adapting
to the requirements of environmental protection and
industrial safety in different countries and regions or
different demands from individual firms for
processing accuracy and cutting rate, special
accessories can be better to meet the variations of
market demands under customization concept. For
the customers who have special requirements, they
often ask agents to conduct trial works for them to
select appropriate machines and special accessories.
Therefore, the analysis of association characteristics
of a region, as well as purchased machines or
responding special accessories may provide
assistance for regional agents’ salespersons when
they give recommendation and quotation. Through
the combination of special accessories, it may
strengthen the difference of market competitiveness.

Table 1. An example form of machine tool quotation

Quotation
Items and Descriptions Unit Unit Price
XX-818, Multi-Function Surface Grinder (**Standard Features) Set X US$ XXXX
**Standard Accessories: Including leveling screws, Nuts and pads,
Balancing arbor, Grinding wheel, Splash guard, Tool for fix work
Free of charge Free of charge
piece, Tool box … etc. About 10 kinds of accessories (attached
according to machine model)
**Special Accessories: Including balancing stand, Precision vise, Set X US$ XXXX
Dresser, Electromagnetic chuck, Coolant system/Dust collector,
Inverter motor/Spindle motor, and others- about 40 items … …
(additionally ordered according to machine model & the customer’s
demand) Set X US$ XXXX
J. T. Tsai et al.: A Sales Support System for Agents of the Machine Tool Industry
2.2 Data Mining Related Technology
Data mining is receiving more and more
attention from the business community, as witnessed
by frequent publications in the popular information
technology related literature, and the growing number
of tools appearing on the market. The commercial
interest in data mining is mainly due to increasing
awareness of companies that the vast amounts of data
collected on customers and their behaviors contain
valuable information. If the hidden information can
be made explicit, it can be used to improve vital
business processes. Frawley et al. [5] pointed out that
data mining is the process of excavating non-obvious,
unknown and probably useful information from
database. Agrawal and Srikant [2] defined data
mining as a technology that combines machine
learning, statistic methods, and database. Through the
analysis of massive information in the database, we
may further extract implicative information,
relationship, and meaningful knowledge. To sum up,
the problem data mining has to handle is to find out
valuable hidden information or system behavior in
massive database. The most important contribution is
that it is capable of extracting meaningful
information from database and inducting a structural
model to be referenced for managers when they make
decisions.
At present, there are many data mining
technologies that could be applied, including mainly
[4]: Analysis of shopping basket, Memory-Based
Reasoning (MBR), automatic cluster detection,
linkage analysis, decision tree, neural network, and
genetic algorithms. Because the focus of this research
is on the association of sales combining machine
tools and special accessories, from the view of
technological attributes and problem application, the
research may be more reasonable to adopt technology
for shopping basket analysis. Shopping basket
analysis is a form of mass analysis or association
analysis. The strength is that it can find out a
combination of goods which could be sold together.
An association rule represents an interesting
relationship written as ABB, “if A occurs, then B
likely occurs”. The probability that both A and B
occur is called the support, and written as count
(AB). The probability that B occurs given that A has
occurred is called the confidence. A is a frequent
pattern if A’s support is no less than a predefined
minimum support threshold. The association rules
mining problem is to find all association rules above
the user-specified minimum support and minimum
confidence. This is done in two steps [8,9]: step 1,
find all frequent patterns; step 2, generate association
rules from frequent patterns.
There are two algorithms for excavating
association rules: Apriori algorithm and FP-growth
(Frequent-Pattern growth) algorithm. In the earlier
years, the application mainly adopted Apriori [1,7]
181
which takes advantage of simple and step-by-step
methods to find out association rules among items in
database. Its major weakness is that it is costly to
handle a huge number of candidate sets, it is tedious
to repeatedly scan the database and check a large set
of candidates by pattern matching. The current trend
is toward to apply FP-growth to reduce time of
scanning database and not produce candidate sets to
speed up the calculation and enhance efficiency
[11,12].
After finding out frequent patterns by the
FP-growth algorithm, we can then produce
association rules from frequent patterns. All the rules
must have support and confidence greater than some
user-defined minimum support and minimum
confidence thresholds, respectively. This research
adopts DBMiner as data mining tool. This tool not
only integrates FP-growth algorithm with database,
but also provides graphic user interface for easy
operation and examination [6].
3. ANALYTIC MODEL AND
APPLICATIONS OF DATA
MINING
To facilitate the systematical construction of
analytic model of data mining, the research
employees the CRoss Industry Standard Process for
Data Mining (CRIPS-DM) [10] to normalize the
analytical process, shown as Figure 1. The procedural
model includes six stages. (1) Business
understanding. It focuses on understanding the
project objectives and requirements from a business
perspective, then converting this knowledge into a
data mining problem definition and a preliminary
plan designed to achieve the objectives. (2) Data
understanding. It starts with an initial data collection
and proceeds with activities in order to get familiar
with the data, to discover first insights into the data or
to detect interesting subsets to form hypotheses for
hidden information. (3) Data preparation. It covers all
activities to construct the final dataset, data that will
be fed into the modeling tools from the initial raw
data. Tasks include table, record and attribute
selection as well as transformation and cleaning of
data for modeling tools. (4) Modeling. Various
modeling techniques are selected and applied and
their parameters are calibrated to optimal values. (5)
Evaluation. It is important to more thoroughly
evaluate the model and review the steps executed to
construct the model to be certain it properly achieves
the business objectives. (6) Deployment. It often
involves applying “live” models within an
organization’s decision making processes, for
example in real-time personalization of web pages or
repeated scoring of marketing databases.
182 International Journal of Electronic Business Management, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2004)
Figure 1: Cross industry standard process for data
mining (CRIPS-DM)
In the stage of business understanding, the
research interviewed with machine tool
manufacturers to analyze the present situation of the
machine tool customers’ purchasing behaviors, as
well as regional agents’ sales practices and demands.
The company usually divides their agents by regions
into seven regions: US and Canada, Central and
South America, Asia, Europe, Oceania, Africa, and
the Middle East. They have agents in each region to
sell machine tools on their behalf. The main machine
model selling in the machine market is a grinding
machine. There are below machine models according
to the machine function: CNC surface grinder (five
kinds), CNC Profile grinder (six kinds), Super
precision surface and form grinder (three kinds),
Automatic precision surface grinding machine (five
kinds), Column type fully automatic surface grinder
machine (two kinds), Submicron CNC profile surface
grinder (two kinds), Heavy duty CNC creep feed &
profile grinder (one kind), Column type surface
grinder (four kinds), High efficiency precision profile
grinder(three kinds) , Conversational CNC profile
grinder(three kinds) … etc., about thirty four kinds of
machine models. The customer orders the machine
model and special accessories that they would like
from their local distributor.
There are a total of fifteen kinds of special
accessories: pull stud, spindle, coolant system, ATC,
the 4th axis, electromagnetic control, controller,
balancing stand, single side water baffle coolant
system, dust collector, wheel weights & flange,
dressing attachment, precision vise, machine lamp,
and frequency converter. There are also many kinds
of accessories according to the specification of each
special accessory. For example, there are different
specifications: 300×600mm, 400×800mm,
400×1000mm, 500×1000mm and 500×1500mm, for
electromagnetic control. There are hundred kinds of
special accessories.
Generally speaking, a salesperson needs a
long-term accumulation of experience to learn how to
settle an order. He or she has to call back to the
company’s R & D department when he or she
promotes machines and the assortment of special
accessories for information that will help him or her
to determine if the machine or accessories will meet
the customer’ s requirements. Therefore, the analysis
of association characteristics between region and
machines/special accessories purchasing status may
provide assistance for regional agents’ salespersons
when they give quotations of various items and
consider recommendation timing. Through the
combination of special accessories, it may strengthen
the differentiation of market competitiveness.
In the stage of data understanding, company C
provided sales data from 1996 to 2001, including
customer data list (agents’ code numbers, titles,
regional code numbers), machine type data list
(machine type code number, names of machines,
function, category, price), special accessory data list
(special accessory code numbers, names, category,
price), regional data list (regional code numbers,
names of countries, continentals), and sales data list
(machine type code numbers, special accessory code
numbers, agents’ code numbers, regional code
numbers, sales dates, sales quantity) , totally over
60,000 records. On the basis of these data, we
analyzed machine types, special accessory types, and
the regions of agents to find out meaningful
association rules.
In the stage of data preparation, because the
output format of the company’s database is limited to
the format of Microsoft Excel, the research adjusted
flowing chart of data preparation as Figure 2 to meet
the requirements of data format of DBMiner. That is,
we firstly export original data to Microsoft Excel for
reorganization and remove no appropriate fields, then
apply Microsoft Access to construct database
relationship. Because DB-Miner has to work with
Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and for the convenience
of construction of the dimension of data analysis, we
transfer from above-mentioned relationship database
to Microsoft SQL server to conduct cube treatment
(the research takes machine type, special accessory,
agent and sales region as dimension, and sales
quantity as measurement). After cube treatment, link
DBMiner to cube of MS SQL for association rule
analysis.
In the stage of modeling, we take DBMiner as a
data mining tool and apply FP-Growth algorithm to
produce association rules. On the threshold value of
minimum support, we start with default preset value
of 1% and accumulate 1% for each experiment.
Regarding the threshold value of minimum
confidence, the reason why we start with preset value
of 50% is that most of salesperson promotes
machines on their experiences and the chance of
being successful of recommendations is about 50%.
Therefore, we determine that if the confidence is over
50%, there will be sufficient information for
salesperson as basis of decision and accumulate by
10% for each experiment. The association rules that
the research wants to find focus on the association
among special accessory, region of sales and machine
types.
J. T. Tsai et al.: A Sales Support System for Agents of the Machine Tool Industry 183

In the stage of evaluation, when using data
mining technology to excavate a lot of knowledge
and rules from a database, there are a lot of
engendered knowledge and rules and some of them
may be repetitive, or meaningless and redundant.
Screening criterion needs to be set to screen out
intuitive interesting association rules [8]. These
screening criteria will help us quickly find out the
interested rules among numerous ones and further to
save the time of analyzing them.
The screening rule of this research mainly includes
two items. The first, sales manager provides the
experience of recommendation decision. The
country/region of customer and the machine
type/model both provides important foundation for
recommendation analysis. Because different country
or region has different environment protect or labor
safety requirement. From these differentiations,
salesperson can recommend correspondent special
accessories to their customer. For the reason of
promotion, machine tool manufacturer will provide
some simple machine type/model with lesser price.
Then the salesperson can encourage customer to
purchase additional special accessories for better
processing accuracy or cutting rate. From above
experience principles, we analyzed machine types,
special accessory types, and the regions of agents to
find out meaningful association rules. Secondly,
regarding the threshold value of minimum
confidence, the reason why we start with preset value
of 50% is that most of salesperson promotes
machines on their experiences and the chance of
being successful of recommendations is about 50%.
Therefore, we determine that if the confidence is over
50%, there will be sufficient information for
salesperson as basis of decision. Based on above
screen items, we screen out 32 interesting association
rules as shown in Table 2.

Figure 2: Flow chart of data preparation

Table 2: The interesting association rules

Region Agent Type of Machine Special Accessory Support Confidence
North America
Conversational CNC Electromagnetic chuck, wheel
(Excluding c022 5.01 69.528
Profile Grinder weights & flanges
branch offices )
North America Column Type Fully
Machine lamp, dressing
(Excluding c022 Automatic Surface Grinder 3.532 73.214
attachment
branch offices) Machine
Conversational CNC Machine lamp, wheel weights &
Taiwan 1.143 63.636
Profile Grinder flange
Column Type Surface Coolant system, electromagnetic
Taiwan 2.152 81.281
Grinder chuck
Column Type Fully Coolant system, electromagnetic
Taiwan 1.034 61.29
Automatic Surface Grinder chuck
High Efficiency Precision Machine lamp, electromagnetic
Taiwan 2.52 80.31
Profile Grinder chuck
High Efficiency Precision Machine lamp, dressing
Asia c017 2.125 71.81
Profile Grinder attachment
Electromagnetic control, coolant
Column Type Surface
Asia c017 system, water baffle, dressing 1.211 68.512
Grinder
attachment
Conversational CNC Machine lamp, electromagnetic
Asia 3.212 76.215
Profile Grinder chuck, wheel weights & flange
Column Type Fully Machine lamp, electromagnetic
Asia 2.01 71.23
Automatic Surface Grinder chuck
High Efficiency Precision Machine lamp, electromagnetic
Asia c019 2.267 65.781
Profile Grinder chuck
184 International Journal of Electronic Business Management, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2004)

Table 2. The interesting association rules (continue)

Region Agent Type of Machine Special Accessory Support Confidence
Column Type Fully Balancing stand, dressing
Africa c016 1.02 63.527
Automatic Surface Grinder attachment
Conversational CNC Machine lamp, electromagnetic
Africa 1.14 61.4
Profile Grinder chuck, wheel weights & flange
High Efficiency Precision Machine lamp, electromagnetic
Africa 1.014 60.21
Profile Grinder chuck
Coolant system, wheel weights
USA(Branch Conversational CNC
c001 & flange, single side water 10.561 64.238
Office) Profile Grinder
baffle, precision vise
USA(Branch Spindle & coolant system, chip
c001 Vertical Machine Center 1.252 74.29
Office) conveyor
USA(Branch Wheel weights & flange,
c001 CNC Surface Grinder 6.042 84.091
Office) dressing attachment
USA(Branch High Efficiency Precision Electromagnetic, dressing
c001 3.089 68.966
Office) Profile Grinder attachment
Conversational CNC Electromagnetic chuck, coolant
England c013 2.842 69.24
Profile Grinder system, dressing attachment
Column Type Fully Spindle & coolant system,
England c013 1.427 73.51
Automatic Surface Grinder dressing attachment
High Efficiency Precision Machine lamp, electromagnetic
England c013 3.248 78.21
Profile Grinder chuck, wheel weights & flange
Conversational CNC Machine lamp, electromagnetic
Germany c012 2,471 65.812
Profile Grinder chuck, wheel weights & flange
Electromagnetic, coolant system,
Column Type Fully
Germany c012 dressing attachment, splash 1.841 68.12
Automatic Surface Grinder
guard
Wheel weights & flange,
Germany c012 CNC Surface Grinder 11.243 71.148
dressing attachment
High Efficiency Precision Machine lamp, electromagnetic
Germany c012 6.147 61.02
Profile Grinder chuck, wheel weights & flange
Europe
Column Type Surface Machine lamp, electromagnetic
(Excluding 1.527 66.245
Grinder chuck, wheel weights & flange
Germany)
Europe Machine lamp, electromagnetic
Conversational CNC
(Excluding chuck, coolant system, wheel 3.214 72.148
Profile Grinder
Germany) weights & flange
Europe Machine lamp, electromagnetic
Column Type Fully
(Excluding c007 chuck, wheel weights & flange, 1.0210 73.2
Automatic Surface Grinder
Germany) dressing attachment
Machine lamp, electromagnetic
Europe
High Efficiency Precision chuck, wheel weights & flange,
(Excluding c005 1.813 78.157
Profile Grinder dressing attachment, splash
Germany)
guard
Europe
Column Type Fully Machine lamp, electromagnetic
(Excluding 7.812 83.212
Automatic Surface Grinder chuck, wheel weights & flange
Germany)
Europe
High Efficiency Precision Machine lamp, electromagnetic
(Excluding 4.25 76.214
Profile Grinder chuck, wheel weights & flange
Germany)
Europe
Wheel weights & flange,
(Excluding CNC Surface Grinder 1.578 62.147
dressing attachment
Germany)
J. T. Tsai et al.: A Sales Support System for Agents of the Machine Tool Industry
Taking Taiwan region as an example, when a
customer purchasing “Column Type Surface
Grinder”, he or she usually selects coolant system
and electromagnetic chuck as assorted special
accessories. Their occurrence rate in the sales
database is 2.152%, which is the “support”. When
this type of machine is sold together with accessories
“coolant system” and “electromagnetic chuck”, their
occurrence rate in the Taiwan region is 81.281%,
which is the “confidence”. In the past, when a
customer purchased some types of machine and
assorted recommendations of special accessories, it
usually needed senior salesperson to make
recommendation by their experiences, seek technical
opinions, or take opinions from R & D department.
That will not be able to take advantage of
complements between special accessories and
machine to create differentiation advantages. The
aforesaid excavation of interesting and association
rules is helpful to both the salesperson who makes
recommendations on special accessories, and for
customers who purchase machines.
In the stage of deployment, for the convenience
of salesperson’s inquiries or make-decision in the
future, the research reorganized rules in Table 2 to be
knowledge database and constructed a simple user’s
interface to link knowledge database and to help
salesperson’s inquiry and satisfy their demands.
This aided system is developed with Visual
Basic 6.0. The assort rule knowledge database
follows the format of ACCESS. The prototype system
is demonstrated in Figure 3. The regions (countries)
include US (branch offices), Taiwan, Europe
(excluding Germany), Germany, England, Africa,
Asia, and North America (excluding branch offices).
Those regions (countries) which have not been
screened out association rules are not listed. Besides,
the column of regions also provides “all” options to
provide all regional search. Regarding to the agents,
we learn from Table 2 that not all of the rules have
relations with agents. So the column of agent in this
system is optional for filling. On machine type, they
include CNC surface grinder, CNC profile grinder,
Super precision surface and form grinder, Automatic
precision surface grinding machine, Column type
fully automatic surface grinder machine, Submicron
CNC profile surface grinder, Heavy-duty CNC Creep
feed & profile grinding machine, Column type
surface grinder, High efficiency precision profile
grinder, and Conversational CNC profile grinder.
Those machine types which have not been screened
out are not listed. The model number is the
sub-category of machine types. When a user set
machine type, the system shows up the model
number for selection.
For example, if a customer in England wants to
buy a Conversational CNC profile grinder of type
number FSG-1224ADII, the salesperson has to select
185
“U.K.” in the column of region, support is set to 1%,
confidence 50%. The salesperson then clicks on
“Mining” and the system displays that its association
rules of special accessory is “electromagnetic chuck,
coolant system and dressing attachment”. So when a
salesperson provides recommendations to his or her
customer, he or she can initially recommend
electromagnetic, coolant system and dressing
attachment as a combination of accessories to the
customer to enhance the differentiation of company’s
products. The prototype of system operation example
is shown in Figure 4.
4. CONCLUSION AND
RECOMMENDATIONS
The industrial application of data mining
technology includes mainly cross analysis of product
sales, analysis of customers loss rate, market
segmentation, and the response and estimation of
direct mails. Most of them are applied to retailing,
finance, insurance, and telecommunication industries
that offer consuming products and services. Because
people in these industries have to face directly the
ultimate customers and the attributes of such
transaction are small amount, high frequencies of
repeat purchases, more patterns of products, and the
numerous transaction related records, the effect of
application of data mining are impressive. But for
industrial products (such as machine tools), probably
due to the characteristics of sales of industrial
products (marketing through regional agency, higher
transaction amounts, longer purchase cycles, less
quantities and more patterns of products, relatively
less numbers of transaction data), the related
application researches of data mining is relatively
less.
Based on at least 60,000 transaction records
provided by machine tool manufacturers, the
research, adopted CRISP-DM process, FP-Tree
algorithm, and utilized DBMiner to conduct data
mining. Under the assistance of a senior sales
manager in screening works, we selected 32
association rules from three dimensions of region,
machine type and special accessory. For the purpose
of search in the future, we also utilized Visual Basic
6.0 to link rule knowledge database and construct
prototype system to aid salesperson’s
recommendations, so related salesperson can easily
search the information they need in future and take
the information as a basis when they consider to
make recommendations to their customer.
To give an evaluation of the discovered rules
about its usefulness of sales person, we conduct a
depth interview with sales manager of case company.
After review these rules and operate the prototype
system, he concludes that this research result have
186 International Journal of Electronic Business Management, Vol. 2, No. 3 (2004)

two significant contributions to their daily operation.
The first, these rules are simplifying the
recommendation decision of regional salesperson.
Because each machine and correspondent special
accessories reaches hundred kinds, the salesperson
often needs long-term experience or ask assistance
from manufacturer’s engineer to make proper
decision. Although these rules still unable to respond
all recommendation situations, but it has been
possible to assist the salesperson to pay attention to
related recommendation demand behind these rules.
Secondly, these interesting rules help the managers in
machine tool manufacture to get the bird’s eye view
of each regional customer’s purchasing behavior and
knowledge. This result not only can help regional
sales recommendation decision, but also assist the
collaborative product forecasting and planning
communication between manufacturer and regional
agent.
The quantity of data collected by the research is
relatively small comparing to the application of data
mining of consumer products. For the machine tool
managers who emphasize on the balance between
build to order and scheduling production, the result of
this research is promising. Especially, under the
production environment of more types and less
quantity, plus complex specifications of models and
special accessories, it often results in too small
support value and difficult to find association rules.
At present, machine tool company sales division has
started to construct more detailed customer data
(including customer’s business revenue, the industry
customer which belongs to, frequency of machine
maintenance, customer responds problem and
demands, and cycle of ordering machine types and
models, etc). By doing so, the sales managers can
understand and control the customer’s demands more
precisely and systematically in the future.

Figure 3: Prototype system for sales support system

Figure 4: The prototype of system operation example

 J. T. Tsai et al.: A Sales Support System for Agents of the Machine Tool Industry
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jen-Teng Tsai is professor at the Department of
Industrial Engineering and Enterprise Information at
Tunghai University, Taiwan. He received both of his
Master and PhD degrees in Industrial Engineering at
the university of Iowa, USA. His current research
interests include Marketing Management,
Collaborative Product Commerce and Customer
Support and Service Systems.
Wen-Chih Chiou is associate professor and
chairman at the Department of Business
Administration of National Chin-Yi Institute of
Technology, Taiwan. He received his MBA degree
from the Tunghai University, and his PhD degree in
Business Administration from the National Sun
Yat-Sen University, Taiwan. He founded a Electronic
Commerce Project Laboratory and participated in
many projects sponsored from industry. He author or
co-author of more than 15 referred journal papers.
His current research interests include Electronic
Commerce, Management of Technology, and Website
Usability Test.
Shui-Shun Lin is associate professor at the
Department of Business Administration of National
Chinyi Institute of Technology, Taiwan. He received
his Master of Science degree from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, and his PhD degree in Industrial
Engineering from the Florida State University, USA.
He founded a Decision Analysis Laboratory and
participated in many projects sponsored from
industry. He is co-inventor of two US patents, and
author or co-author of more than 20 referred journal
papers. His current research interests include
Electronic Commerce, Decision Support System, and
Customer Relationship Management.
Zeng-Xiang Tsai received his Master of Science
degree in Industrial Engineering and Enterprise
Information from Tunghai University, Taiwan.
Chyuan Perng is associate professor of Industrial
Engineering & Enterprise Information at Tunghai
University, Taiwan. He received his PhD. degree in
Industrial Engineering from Texas Tech University,
USA. His research interests are Supply Chain
Management and Collaborative Product Commerce.
He has also participated in several industrial projects
with machine tool companies in Taiwan.
(Received July 2003, revised September 2004,
accepted October 2004)