Every company has that one salesperson. The one who promises delivery in 3 days when everyone knows it takes 5. The one who sells “custom” configurations that the factory can’t actually build. They sell a lot, but they create chaos. And your operations team hates them.
Why do they do it? Is it because they are bad people? No. It’s because they are working in the dark. They don’t know what the factory can actually deliver. They are guessing. And a salesperson who guesses always promises too much.
Connect Sales and Production With a Simple “Capacity Check”
We worked with a furniture maker. Their sales team would take an order for a custom sofa, and promise it in 6 weeks. But the upholstery department was already booked for 8 weeks. The salesperson had no visibility into the production schedule. They were selling a lie.
We didn’t build a complex system. We just created a simple view. Every morning, the production manager updated a spreadsheet that showed the next available production slot for each product line. The sales team could check this list before they quoted a delivery date.
- Sales could see that “Custom Sofa” had a 9-week lead time today.
- Sales could promise “9 weeks” with confidence.
- Production stopped getting angry calls about broken promises.
It took one afternoon to set up the spreadsheet. The result? Customer satisfaction went up, and the returns for late delivery dropped dramatically. This is the core of practical ERP Consulting: giving people the information they need to make honest promises.
The 15-Minute Meeting That Ends the Blame Game
The single biggest source of friction between sales and operations is a lack of information. Sales thinks operations is lazy. Operations thinks sales is reckless. The truth is, they just don’t talk. We made them talk.
We started a daily 15-minute “huddle.” At 8:30 AM, the sales manager and the production manager met. They looked at the “promised delivery report.” They identified the 3 most at-risk orders that day. They made a plan. 15 minutes. No excuses.
- Create a list of the top 5 reasons for late deliveries last month.
- Schedule a 15-minute daily stand-up meeting between sales and ops.
- Use that meeting to solve the top 1 or 2 problems for that day only.
That daily huddle changed the culture. The blame game stopped. They became a team. This is the real benefit of ERP Consulting. It’s not just about the data in the computer. It’s about the conversation that the data enables. Start the conversation, and stop the chaos.