Good afternoon readers!

Elementary, yes! It's pure elementary!
If you are working in a sales line and that you have been entrusted with task of quoting the customer's order inquiries,  the first thing you should do is to check and confirm if the inquired products are related to your business. 
Then, you move on to go determine the stock availability and then finally determine the best delivery date that you can commit to your potential customer. 
Here is the summary;

1. Check and confirm Bills of material (BOM) enquired. Decline if not relevant.
2. Check stock availability in inventory. Purchase from supplier if not available.
3. Quote best delivery date.

In most companies this is a normal practice. However, in a company which I came across recently, I had a shock to be informed that a particular sales manager does not include method of allocating lead time in the process of deriving to his best delivery date. Rubbish! 

The conversion of raw material, step by step up to finished product ready for shipment requires one to include the method of assigning lead process time to each process the product go through, irrevocably! 
And this is elementary!

I can assume the condition of working to produce such products under that sales manager will be one that is best described as chaotic!

VDN