Background In my seventeen years as a partner in manufacturing the most frequent

Background
In my seventeen years as a partner in manufacturing the most frequent conflicts occured between the sales manager and the production manager. Nearly all of the arguments were based on meeting sales commitments given to customers. The urgencies often called for production to alter its schedules, breaking off to complete assembly and ship product to satisfy these time commitments for delivery to the customer. Sales will contend that production needs to raise its inventory to meet specific short-term sales needs. Operations claims that higher inventory levels will raise costs, action that veers away from low cost production initiatives. In the short-term, an arbiter, perhaps a general manager, would make a snap decision depending on the nature of the emergency. One could not afford to lose a large order from a major customer, but might delay shipment for a small order to a tier B distributor. However, a formula was never established on how to deal with these issues over a span of time.

Discussion Topic
Chapter eight discusses sales and operations planning toward the coordinating of activities between manufacturing, marketing, and logistics. According to the text, this process seeks to, “…provide better customer service, lower inventory, shorten customer lead times, stabilize production rates, and give top management a handle on the business.”
For our discussion, deliver a problem that might occur between marketing/sales and production, Identify the opposing needs of these two departments with regard to the problem at hand, and offer a long-term solution to eliminate the problem in the future.

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