I recently attended the Medical Design and Manufacturing West show in Anaheim. It was a great turnout and I met a lot of new people – mostly Sales people. The show featured thousands of booths exhibiting their manufactured products.
Of course, I was interested in learning what these manufacturers used for their scheduling so I wandered the vast maze of booths and spoke with many of the exhibitors. I received a variety of responses - anything from, “I have no idea what they use for scheduling, but it seems to be working okay,” to “They use [x] and it’s horrible.” Those that responded with the former explained that because they were in Sales, and not in production, that whatever their company used for scheduling didn’t affect them.
I strongly disagree with that. If scheduling and Sales aren’t connected, how would Sales know what to tell customers? What would they say? “Yes, your very large order will be ready by the end of the week, and by the way, this is a complete guess and I’m crossing my fingers”? If Sales was connected to the scheduling that took place on the factory floor, then they could give accurate delivery dates to customers, and prevent late orders and customer dissatisfaction. Furthermore, when orders are running late, Sales can check for themselves to see what the problem is without disrupting the shop floor/scheduler, and then communicate this to the customer.
In my experience, it’s just always better to communicate rather than make broken promises, and this goes for everything in work and in life.
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