A Study On Export Supplier Leadtime Reduction

With the development of WM global sourcing strategy, more and more made inChina products are exported to all over the world. Usually the supplier lead time lasts3-5months, which starts from receiving the official order till products ready at originport. During this export business, lots of parties are involved, which includes rawmaterial supplier, manufacturer, warehouse and transportation carrier, distributor,wholesaler and retailer, which makes the whole supply chain more complicated ininformation sharing and management. And the operation process contains12key steps.Meanwhile, suppliers often encounter different requirements from sales country,which includes urgent orders, cancellation of orders, ship date or quantity change oforders. Under this circumstance, suppliers have to extend the lead time so as to ensurethe on time delivery. In regarding to this, how to make products arrive to the salescountry as early as possible is worth to studying, so as to reduce inventory costs whileincrease customer satisfaction and improve supply chain efficiency.This article is in the stand point of purchaser WM, analyzed the lead time issue ofC supplier under the international export environment and studied the feasible methodon how to forecast future purchase order. Afterwards, a quantified and qualifiedcollaboration strategy is defined, such as supplier capacity planning, push-pullproduction method and milk run delivery.To prove the feasibility of above strategies, we implemented them to particularpurchase cycle of X product, as a result, the lead time for X product was decreasedfrom60days to45days. The success of this case study and lead time reductionmethod is very useful to those companies, who are facing the long lead time issueduring export business.