Читать книгу Supply Chain Management For Dummies - Daniel Stanton - Страница 60

Salespeople often say that you can’t sell a product you don’t have, and if you ask them how much product the company should make, the number is high. In other words, the salespeople want to make sure that you have enough product to meet all the customer demand that they can possibly generate, plus a little bit more. That scenario is seldom realistic.

TABLE 3-2 Common Supply Chain Management Trade-Offs and Solutions

Conflicts and Trade-Offs	Solutions
Sales versus operations	Sales and operations planning (S&OP)
Customer versus supplier	Collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment (CPFR)
Engineering versus procurement	Cross-functional teams
Inventory versus customer service (wholesale/retail)	Forecasting
Inventory versus downtime (manufacturing)	Lean Manufacturing
Procurement versus logistics	Total cost analysis

Meanwhile, the operations and logistics people are responsible for the costs of making, moving, and storing products. They also understand that variations in your supply chain flow cost money because you need to pay for the space and the people to meet your peak demand, even if you aren’t using that space and those people the rest of the time. Operations people want to make and store only as many products as are needed to keep manufacturing and logistics costs low.

This trade-off between sales and operations can lead to major conflicts in a company. In many cases, a sales department creates an unrealistic forecast, and the operations department is blamed for having too much inventory. In other cases, the sales department can’t meet its revenue targets because the operations team was too conservative in its production planning.

A common solution for this problem is a process called Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP), which forces the sales and operations teams to coordinate and agree on their goals and targets.

S&OP usually starts with a sales forecast for a certain planning horizon. The sales team might estimate that it could sell 1,000 widgets per month for the next 12 months, for example. This forecast is called an unconstrained forecast because it’s based on a best-case scenario.