Why we list production days and shipping days separately
A single lead-time number hides two different things: how long the factory takes to make your order and how long the order takes to reach you. We keep them apart on every offer because they go wrong for different reasons, and the day you need to order by depends on both.
Ask a supplier how long an order takes and you'll usually hear one number, say 30 days. Ask what's inside that number and you'll find two, and they behave very differently.
Production days
This is the time your order waits in the factory's queue plus the time it takes to run. It stretches when the factory is busy. You can sometimes pay a rush fee to jump the queue, but most of the time the only thing that reliably shortens it is placing the order earlier.
It's also the half that changes with little warning. A factory that quotes 12 days in a quiet month can quote 25 in the run-up to a busy season, for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
Shipping days
Shipping is where you can spend your way out of trouble. Air freight can turn three weeks into a few days, though on a cheap, bulky part it can wipe out the margin. Ocean freight keeps the unit cost down but leaves the goods exposed for weeks to weather, port delays and customs paperwork.
The right choice can change from one order to the next, and sometimes from one line to the next on the same order. That's why we keep shipping as its own number instead of folding it into a single figure you can't pull apart later.
Two 30-day quotes
Take two suppliers who both say 30 days.
- One is 25 days of production and 5 days on a truck.
- The other is 10 days of production and 20 days on a boat.
If the first one slips, it slips at the factory, early, while you can still move the order or find stock somewhere else. The second carries three weeks of transit risk the first doesn't have, and if it runs late you tend to find out when the container is already at sea and there's not much to do except wait. So when a quote says 30 days, ask how many of those days are shipping.
Where you'll see the two numbers
Every offer in our catalog has its own lead time and its own shipping days. Signed in, the product page lists each offer with both numbers and their total side by side, so you can compare arrival dates and still see what each one is made of. A volume break can have its own lead time and shipping days too, because a bigger run often ships differently from a small one.
Your own items carry the same two numbers, and an item you create from a catalog product starts with the figures from its catalog offer. The forecast works out a stockout date from how fast you use the item, then counts back the lead time and the shipping days to get an Order by date, which is the last day you can place the order and still have it arrive before the shelf is empty. The safety days you set on the item go into the reorder point as buffer stock, so the new order should land with roughly that many days still on the shelf. The forecast can raise that buffer if your usage or lead times swing a lot, but it never goes below what you set. If you type a reorder point of your own on the item, that number is used as it is.
The forecast also learns from your own receipts. Once an item has a couple of received orders behind it, it starts weighing the quoted days against how long those orders took, from placing the order to having the stock in hand. And once an item has been received from one of our catalog factories, a shutdown on that factory's calendar that falls inside the wait also moves the Order by date earlier by the days it's closed.
Where it ships from
Some products carry a Shipped from USA flag. It means the goods ship to you from a warehouse in the US, sometimes at the offer itself and sometimes only at one of its volume breaks. The flag is about where the goods leave from and makes no claim about where they were made, so a tube molded overseas and stocked in a US warehouse would carry it. Stock on a US shelf turns the shipping half into days rather than weeks, while the overseas run keeps the factory price and takes the boat. If you've got six weeks of stock left, the second supplier's 30 days still gets there with room to spare. If you've got ten days, it doesn't, and the US shelf is worth paying for. If you're weighing the freight bill as well, our post on landed cost covers that part.