Every Monday morning we had a meeting. The sales manager would yell about late deliveries. The operations manager would yell about unrealistic promises. And I would sit there wondering who to fire. It turned out neither of them was wrong. The system was broken. ERP Consulting showed us that the real problem was a lack of shared, real-time information.
The Weekly War: A Typical Monday
Sales would bring a list of 20 “urgent” customer requests. Operations would counter with a list of 15 reasons why they couldn’t deliver. This went on for months. ERP Consulting ran a simple test: they compared the sales forecast with actual production output. The numbers didn’t match by 40%. That gap was the source of every fight.
- Sales was forecasting based on wishful thinking, not historical data.
- Operations was scheduling based on a fixed capacity that never changed.
- Neither team looked at the same dashboard.
One Rule to End the Fights
We created a shared “available-to-promise” dashboard. Only the system can approve a delivery date. ERP Consulting helped us set the logic: if the system says “available on June 10th,” then both sales and operations accept it. No exceptions. The weekly Monday meeting dropped from two hours to 30 minutes. People stopped blaming each other and started solving real problems. The peace of mind alone was worth the consulting fee.