Let's Do Some House-Cleaning Part I: Some common settings we will use throughout this blog

I want to call my company "Mikoudai Inc" (means "rice bag" in Chinese, nice), which just received its first drug approval from FDA (Hooray!). Now we want to sell the drug, obviously. After spending a fortune on a prestigious consulting firm, we come up with a map of the United States, divided into a nice hierarchy of regions, districts and territories. Every zipcode in this country falls within one single territory, one single district, and one single region.

The details of the sales organization hierarchy are as such:

We have two regions, one West and one East. We assign 10000 to the West and 20000 to the East. These numbers will be referred to as "Region #" throughout this blog.

Each region has six districts. For the West region, they are numbered 10100, 10200, 10300, 10400, 10500 and 10600. For the East region, they are numbered 20700, 20800, 20900, 21000, 21100 and 21200. They will be referred to as "District #".

Each district has at least seven territories, and at most nine. In total we have 99 territories. The "Territory #", as we shall call it, also contains five digits - the first three come from the District # to which the territory belongs, and the last two digits denote the order of the territory within the district. For example, Territory # 10101 is the first territory in District 10100, while 20906 is the sixth territory in District 20900. Except for their geographical proximity, territories are ordered randomly inside each district, just as districts inside each region.

Simple enough, right? You can download an Excel file containing the entire structure of our sales organization here.

You might have noticed that the entire numbering system is rather logical. As you will see, this is very important.