The author describes how working with Marketing and Sales helps manage the constraints in the supply chain while meeting customer requirements and maintaining profi tability. Copyright © 2014 Journal of Business Forecasting | All Rights Reserved | Fall 2014 5 of the larger sizes. The plants simply weren’t that agile. We were going to have to live with the constraints for a while, figure out a way to manage the problem, and then try to reduce the impact as much as possible. It wasn’t until we included Sales and Marketing personnel in our monthly planning meetings that we began to figure out ways to deal with it. Someone needed to not only determine who gets what when the supply is constrained, but also what to do with the excess supply. I sought the assistance of our Product Planning Manager from Marketing and our Product Manager from Sales. On a monthly basis, once the allocated supply was known, we sat in a room and hammered out exactly how many of each size we should order, based on a customer priority classification, and then decide how they should be dispersed. Determining customer priority and mix for us meant considering several different issues. There may be customers ...

From Issue: Interdepartmental Cooperation Optimizes Supply Chain Limitations
(Fall 2014)

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Interdepartmental Cooperation Optimizes Supply Chain Limitations