Andrew Baines, assistant purchasing manager at Eastern Pharmaceuticals Ltd$.$ Told the sales representative, John Cao, of Lucas Paper & Box Company that he would send him the purchase order for the packaging components and $25$ percent of the contract filling. John replied that Shannon Bailey, of the marketing department, had promised $100$ percent of the contract filling. Andrew said that it$$s not marketing responsibility, but John replied that he had always dealt with both marketing and purchasing and that sometimes purchasing was not involved at all in the projects.

John Cao had designed an attractive new style of sample. This one idea was to be used in the near future to sample several other tablet products. John had developed the idea for marketing, expecting that he would get both the printing and the contract filling. Although Eastern did $90$ percent of their manufacturing and packaging, they did not have the equipment to heat$-$seal the strip into the folded cards. When goods came in from a contract packager such as Lucas, they were held in inventory until required by marketing.

Shannon Bailey, sales promotion manager, and John Slaughter, advertising manager both made a lot of progress in working with John Cao, standardizing the samples to be used for sales promotions and advertising mailings.

Shannon and John were having difficulties in getting cooperation of other departments involved. Purchasing, manufacturing, and information systems pointed out that they could not drop their usual work $$every time marketing wanted something in a rush.

Andrew felt that the action taken by Shannon telling the supplier how much contract filling business he would get was the last straw. With this in mind, he went to see Matt Roberts to try to get a policy statement on the matter. Matt explained that marketing managers were responsible for their budgets however, the final selection of sources for any purchased items that had to be packed by the plant had always been the responsibility of the purchasing department. In this particular case, there was still a significant inventory of old$-$style samples in the building, which marketing had not considered when they promised John Cao $100$ percent of contract filling. Andrew felt that placing all the contract filling right away would build up the stock of samples unnecessarily. Besides this, he had negotiated a better price from another reliable supplier, Sheppard Packaging, and felt that he would give the balance of $75$ percent to them.

Identify the problem and provide possible solutions$/$alternatives$.$