The Marketing team is rather new within Horizon and encounters difficulties with adjusting, finding their purpose and implementing a good course of action. They also find it difficult to get the other departments to accept and recognize them as a vital unit within Horizon. The Marketing department is in charge of customer relations and the Production department is in charge of actually processing the food, transporting it and keeping the inventory. But as stated before, they fail to cooperate and throw as such the company into serious problems. In all, the major problem is given by the company's incapability to honor their orders in time and the cause for it is the poor collaboration between the two major departments within Horizon.
The gravity of the situation created is not debatable and fact remains that the problem must be solved in no time; otherwise Horizon Foods might be faced with the loss of its customers and might even witness its business decline. The first step would be to clearly analyze the operations handled by each department: break their operations into small steps and identify how they are doing in terms of quality and timely delivery.
The communication system must be improved as to permit a continuous communication between the plants and the public warehouses as to allow company managers to know at all times how many products are still in stock, how many are in the production...
They must first learn to respect each other as vital parts of Horizon. Then, they should maintain and encourage continuous communications, they would have to constantly discuss and compare the plant inventory with the product inventory at the public warehouses. The Marketing team would have to be the Horizon Foods' liaison between the company and the customers. And it would help if, prior to talking to the customers, taking orders and establishing delivery dates, they first talked it through with the production team to see how long would it take for the order to be completed, rather than setting dates without previously consulting Production.
Finally, they should increase the efficiency of their operations by implementing two consecutive steps. First, they should cut down the transportations costs. Horizon could do this by establishing one or two days a month for transports, in which to deliver products to more locations. Then, they should invest the economies made into purchasing better and newer production technologies, which would allow the company to process more food products in less time.
Bibliography
Schary, P., Horizon Foods Corporation, College of Business, Oregon State University
