This invention relates to a technique for enhancing the accuracy of sale quota information used in allocation for reservation of a delivery date reply to thereby shorten a sale-quota reply response time. Disclosed herein is a delivery date reply system which permits preallotment of a sales quota of a sellable distribution item and which is responsive to receipt of a delivery date inquiry for allocating for reservation the content of such inquiry from within the sale quota to thereby reply a delivery date and, when the inquiry content is not allocated to the sale quota, issues a reply as to a delivery date after having performed sale quota alteration simulation for alteration to a sale quota with maximal satisfaction of a customer's desired delivery date, quantity and item contents. The system has a means for storing history records of reception of the delivery date inquiry and execution of the sale quota alteration simulation, a computation means for computing based on the history data a ratio of a number of cases with completion of the execution of the sale quota alteration simulation to a number of inquiries per unit time to thereby check a resultant value in comparison with a predetermined reference value and detect a change when the value exceeds the reference value, a means for being activated upon detection of the change by the computation means and for updating the priority order of a sale-expected item that becomes a base of generation of the sale quota, and a sale quota generator means for generating a new expected sale quota based on a result of the updated priority order. When the computation means detects the change, the system updates the priority order of a sale-expected item serving as a base of generation of an expected sale quota and reads a result of the priority order to newly generate a sale quota for use in allocation for reservation of the delivery date reply.
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