Hierarchical Decision Processes. We all experience a considerable amount of hierarchical decision making in our lives. For example, we have Federal, State and Local governments all trying to make decisions in concert with each other. It is hoped that at the Federal level they will not overly specify, so as to overly restrict decision making at lower levels. This is not always the case.

In the case of Zygar Pharmaceuticals the firm, and particularly Alan Machin, someone in the firm makes some over arching decisions about which physicians are important to visit. For example, salespeople aren't supposed to visit physicians too frequently. The salespeople are told they should use meetings as a way to bring several physicians together for a variety of purposes. They are supposed to make sure and visit new physicians in order to meet them and learn more about their prescription patterns. At a slightly more detailed level the salespeople are taught that they should give higher priority to scheduling difficult to see physicians that often prescribe Zygar's pharmaceuticals. But outside of these overall guidelines, the salespeople are expected to put together their own schedules. At its root this is the purpose of this Sales Trainer.

In this vein, it is important for a salesperson to not get too caught up in all of the details of a daily schedule when trying to decide what locations to visit on what days at a weekly level. Thus these training exercises are set up so that the salesperson will first schedule each day of the week with some particular location. This gives rise to the Week Exercises. After these locations have been assigned the salesperson can get more involved in actually setting up times for particular interactions. This process is also hierarchical in nature.

The Program. The program has been developed in Visual Basic to run in the Windows environment common to many computers. Developing in this framework allows the program to work largely in the point and click user environment that is so prevalent today.

There is an underlying database that contains all of the physician information. One of the most important tables in the database contains a record for each physician with information about the physician. Each attribute of the physician is called a field. While a database contains many tables, each table contains records and fields. The records correspond to rows and the fields correspond to columns in the table. While these are not the exact names for the fields in the Physicians table, the following should help you understand their basic content.