The sales team sold something we can’t produce

This is a more common occurrence than people in capital equipment organizations realize. Sometimes it happens without senior management becoming aware. When a feature or capability is sold or otherwise promised to a customer that has not yet been fully released into your production systems it creates yet another way to derail progress on agreed upon growth initiatives.

Whether it is a long discussed but never developed new feature or an answer to a competitive threat, committing to a customer something that is incomplete or unproven adds risk to the entire organization.  Engineering will be called upon to jump in and assess what can be done prior to the committed ship date with regard to product and technology development and related documentation.  Supply chain might need to act to spin up new vendors or pull in lead times.  Technical service will be required to train the resources that will support that customer and later develop documentation to enable long term standardization of the new feature.  Manufacturing operations will of course need to be positioned to build it and add the new feature to the configuration matrix to ensure compatibility (or not) with existing configurations.  Marketing and/or product management will need to determine pricing for future orders.  Once proven and released the sales team will need training on how to sell it broadly and profitably. The finance department might also need to act as the terms and conditions for released product sales are typically different for unproven, unreleased products.  There is simply higher risk of not receiving payment, particularly that last percentage tied to customer acceptance.  

While all those various departments are responding to this new feature sale guess what they are not working on?  The agreed upon roadmap for product and technology development, strategic supply chain and manufacturing operations improvements, and any strategic technical service initiatives all suffer with the distraction. The impact is similar and accretive to the death by sustaining engineering case study above.  

At CapSure Solutions we have proven business processes and governance methodologies that, combined with cross functional coaching, will help your organization prevent adverse impact of such a sales event.  It very may well be that the ‘sold’ new feature is required in the market and will be profitable to the organization long term.  We are here to help ensure that outcome.