Comment: Using Product Profiling to Illustrate Manufacturing-Marketing Misalignment

In their July–August 1998 article, Hill, Menda, and Dilts described Rumack Pharmaceutical Company (disguised name) as an example of misalignment between marketing and manufacturing. The problem was that marketing had stretched the product line beyond manufacturing's capacity limits. The authors stated that operations managers took an action that “would seem unwise or contrary to accepted practice in many of today's manufacturing organizations. Rumack decided to increase production lot sizes by an average of 100 percent” [p. 61]. The authors were respectful (appropriately, in view of Rumack's open door to their research) of the deliberations that resulted in this decision. Many readers, though, will probably wonder, as I do, about the correctness of the decision, considering the widely held impression that lot sizes should fall, not rise.