Production versus sales. Why the wall between departments costs so much

Sales is measured on revenue and customer satisfaction. Production on utilisation, cost and on-time delivery. Both are reasonable. Together they produce a conflict that arises afresh every day.

For sales, every customer matters, and the customer wants it fast. So a date is quoted that goes down well with the customer. For production, every change to the plan is a loss: changeovers, replanning, moving material, overtime. So it pushes back. Both act correctly by their own goals and wrongly for the company.

In lean thinking this is a classic case of mura, unevenness. It is not that there is too much work, but that it arrives in waves that nobody has smoothed. And the waves arise at the boundary between the departments, because nobody there is responsible for the handover.

When I look at the interface, I almost always find the same gaps. They are unspectacular, and that is exactly why they persist for years.

• Sales does not know the real capacity. It knows a number from the system, shaped by wishful thinking and outdated master data.
• Production does not know the customer situation. It sees an order with a date, not the customer for whom that date decides a follow-up order.
• Nobody defines what urgent means. So everything is urgent, and urgent no longer means anything.
• Changes run through people, not through a process. Whoever knows the right foreman gets their order pulled forward. Everyone else waits.
• The meeting between the two only takes place once something has gone wrong. Then it is about blame, not about solutions.

Each of these gaps is a handover error. Together they form what is referred to in the corridors as a culture problem.

A plant manufactured series products and, alongside them, customer-specific variants. Sales liked selling the variants because the margin was better. Production hated them because they disrupted the takt. The weekly planning meeting had become an arena. People went in with lists and came out with accusations.

We changed two things. First, sales and production jointly mapped the path of an order from quotation to delivery, on a wall, with all the handovers. In doing so, sales saw for the first time what changeover effort a variant triggers. And production saw for the first time what the customer actually needs, and that it was often fewer special requests than the order suggested.

Second, a fixed rule for rush orders was agreed: whoever wants to pull an order forward names which other order moves back to make room. Sales thereby got a real decision instead of a wish, and production a reliable plan. The planning meeting became shorter and quieter. Not because the people became nicer, but because the boundary had been given a process.

The core of the problem is easy to name and hard to solve: the interface belongs to nobody. The sales manager is responsible for sales, the production manager for production. For what happens in between, there is no position on the organisation chart.

It does not need a new department. It needs an agreement on who is responsible for the handover. In some plants that is production planning with a clear mandate. In others, a short daily meeting between internal sales and production control, with fixed questions: what is new, what is changing, what is at risk. What matters is not the form, but that the handover belongs to someone and that both managers back them.

That is a leadership decision, and it sits with the executive management. As long as both departments are only measured on their own goals, every agreement at the boundary will break under the first quarter-end pressure.

The conflict is structural. That is why appeals to team spirit do not solve it, and neither does a joint barbecue. What works in my experience:

• Set a shared KPI. On-time delivery to the customer belongs to both, not just to production. If it drops, both sit at the table.
• Have both sides map the order path together. Value stream mapping across the departmental boundary is the most effective remedy against mutual myths.
• Define urgent. A rule that everyone knows replaces a hundred discussions.
• Demand a process for changes. No pulling forward through the back channel, but a route that is the same for everyone.
• In meetings, listen for blame and ask every time: which handover was missing? That shifts the view from the person to the process.

And visit both worlds. An executive management that knows sales only from figures and production only from reports will never understand the conflict.

Sometimes the boundary has generated so much friction over the years that it is no longer about processes. Then two managers face each other who no longer believe a word the other says. In that case, process work alone is not enough. First there needs to be a facilitated conversation in which both say what they need from the other and what they have not been getting so far.

That is uncomfortable, and it rarely succeeds without someone from outside who is not a party to it. But it is the precondition for the new processes having any chance at all. A process that two people do not want will not be lived, no matter how good it is.

The good news: in almost all the cases I have supported, both sides wanted the same thing. Satisfied customers, a calm plan, no firefighting. They had just never talked about it at the same table.