At present, its application fields are gradually expanding to service industries such as hotels, banks, car rental, transportation, telecommunications and electric power. The main features are as follows:
1. Enterprises have relatively fixed production capacity. Take aviation, hotels and other industries as examples. Due to the characteristics of the industry, there are large-scale initial investments (such as buying new planes, building new hotels, opening new business outlets, etc.), and the maximum production or service capacity is fixed for a long time, so it is impossible to meet the demand changes by changing its production or service capacity in the short term. Only under the condition of limited production capacity can enterprises improve their profits by improving their management level.
2. Predictability of demand. The resources of aviation, hotels, banks and other service enterprises can be divided into tangible resources (such as airplane seats, hotel rooms, bank service windows) and intangible resources (such as hotel check-in time, bank window queuing time, etc.). Their customers can be divided into reserved customers and random customers, and their sales can be divided into peak season and off season. Only by analyzing and forecasting the customer and market information collected by computer or manual reservation system can managers understand the changing law of different customers' needs and realize demand transfer, and thus formulate a reasonable resource stock allocation and pricing mechanism to maximize the enterprise's income.
3. the product or service is volatile. Different from the products of traditional manufacturing industry, the products or services of service enterprises such as aviation, hotels and banks are volatile, that is, timeliness. The value of its products or services decreases with time, so it can't meet the future needs of customers through storage. If it can't be sold within a certain period of time, the enterprise will permanently lose the potential benefits of these resources. Enterprises can only reduce the idle rate of resources through management means such as discounts, so as to achieve the goal of enterprise income growth.
4. Market segmentation. Airlines, hotels, banks and other industries are facing a customer-centered, fierce competition and diversified demand market. Different customers have different perceptions and sensitivities about the products or services of enterprises, and adopting a single price strategy will lead to customer loss or potential income loss. For example, there are two kinds of customers in the aviation market, one is business customers who are insensitive to price but sensitive to time and service, and the other is leisure customers who are sensitive to price but insensitive to time and service. If the high-priced strategy is adopted, leisure customers may choose low-cost airlines or other means of transportation, resulting in idle airline seat resources. On the other hand, if the low-price strategy is adopted, business customers choose low prices or lose because of dissatisfaction with service quality, resulting in a decline in the potential revenue of airlines. Effectively subdividing the market, setting different prices and allocating different resources for customers with different demand levels are important ways to solve the problem of idle resources or potential income loss of enterprises.
5. Demand with random fluctuation. If the customer's demand is certain and there is no fluctuation, the enterprise can meet the customer's demand by adjusting its production and service capabilities. However, aviation, hotels, banks and other industries are facing uncertain customer demand, which fluctuates seasonally or periodically. Enterprises adopt revenue management to raise prices in the peak demand season and increase the profitability of enterprises; In the off-season demand, strategies such as discounts are adopted to improve resource utilization and reduce resource idleness.
6. It has the characteristics of high fixed cost and low marginal cost. The operation of aviation, hotels, banks and other industries belongs to industries with large initial investment, and it is difficult to change the production or service capacity in a short period of time, but the cost of selling a unit of resources is very low. Take the flight of Boeing 737-311 as an example. According to the model cost data of an airline in 1999, the average cost of each flight is as follows: the total cost is about 61,111 yuan, of which the fixed cost is about 55,111 yuan, and the marginal cost is only 1.133 million yuan. The fixed cost is 1.833 times of the marginal cost, so overloaded passengers can get more profits and improve the total income of enterprises without obviously increasing the cost.
7. The product or service can be pre-sold. Enterprises adopt revenue management in the face of customers with diversified needs. On the one hand, they pre-sell resources to price-sensitive customers at a certain discount price by booking in advance to reduce the probability of idle resources; On the other hand, restrictions are set to prevent customers who are sensitive to time or service from buying resources at low prices, resulting in the loss of potential income of high-priced customers. At the same time, the reservation data is analyzed and predicted. According to the probability distribution of resources purchased by customers with different demand levels, on the basis of ensuring that resources are not idle, resources are reserved for business customers who are willing to pay high prices as much as possible.