Importance of Coordination between Marketing and Operations Management Functions

Running Head: OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
Operations management
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
An organisation has various business functions and it is important to have the
coordination between various business functions of an organisation to ensure success. It is due
to lack of coordination between two or more business function that most of the quality gaps
occur. The quality in many organisations is an impact of coordination between the marketing
function and the operations management functions. In this context, the essay aims to explain the
role of these functions in an organisation. The essay discusses the quality conflicts that arise as a
result of the lack of coordination between the two business functions. It will be explained in
terms of actual quality, customers’ expectation, customer satisfaction and/or dissatisfaction. The
essay highlights the importance of coordination between the two business functions.
The marketing department of any organisation is associated with researching and
developing the marketing plan and maintain the marketing function. The marketing plan details
the operations, threats and current situation with respect to external environment, customers and
competition. The marketing manger needs to ensure that the marketing plans are in conjunction
with the setting of the financial budgets. The marketing managers have several objectives such as
determining the market actions, sales budget, identifying the resource requirements for new as
well as existing products and also include forecasts of demand (Wright 2011).
The operation management deals with the activities of reviewing, designing, and using
the operation systems to meet the targets set by an organisation (Heizer 2016). The marketing
plan of the company cannot be successful without the role of operations management. Marketing
functions are dependent on the operations management function for the manufacture, delivery of
produces and services and the physical development. There are many pitfalls in the international
marketing. Therefore, it is imperative that the operations management functions ate carried
smoothly. The operations management must have sufficient capacity to deliver and required

2OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
information. The offers promoted by the marketing needs to be performed by the operations
management. Else it will not be delivered on time and to specification (Baker 2014). Therefore,
it can be concluded that there is a need of effective coordination between the marketing functions
and the operation management functions.
Operations management function and marketing functions are important as it has great
impact on the quality of the product and services. It is with the help of coordination between the
Marketing and Operations departments, that the organisation recognises the market needs and if
it can deliver its expectations. It is highly indispensible to make both departments function
seamlessly. Lack of coordination between both lead to quality conflict in the organisation.
Differences in the objectives and expertise make both the department stand at odds with one
another (Yu et al. 2014). There is a great deal of interdependence which indicates the importance
of coordination between the two business functions. Adobe has experienced the management
revamps. Its performance was improved after it overcame its coordination between the marketing
and operations management functions. It addressed the performance issues by developing strict
statistics and checking programs. It has now redefined the management functions (Rock et al,
2014).
The way in which both the functions are organised and evaluated determines the success
of the organisation. Operations are focused on cost reduction while marketing is rewarded for
sales growth. Although each objective is vital it is difficult to evaluate each of them separately
(Dixon et al. 2014). There is a constant push and pull in attaining the mutually exclusive goals.
There are different natures of quality conflicts due to lack of coordination between both
functions including cost/value tradeoffs, and pricing (Khanna 2015).