Dependence and conflict between production and sales

Functional interdependence between production and sales leads to the need for coordination and existence of conflict. Their plans and activities have to be coordinated. It is commonly recognized, however, that many conflicts may exist between these two functions due to, for example, difference in orientation. In this article, the coordination process will be discussed based on a telephone survey among 54 industrial companies. It will provide results on the way production and sales coordinate their plans and activities, on the experienced problems in the coordination process and on suggested improvements. These topics are presented in relation to the logistics structure. Some differences between make-to-stock, make-to-order and engineer-to-order will be identified. The results illustrate some of the intuitively identified problem areas, but not all of them. The main conflict areas concern information flow, orientation and setting, and meeting delivery lead-times.