Being waited on
Being the Bottleneck In a Chain You Cannot See
Delay does not stay the size you caused it. Every weekly cycle it misses downstream multiplies it, and none of those cycles is visible from here.
Who is working when, for the people on this page
Us, as our signature block describes us
Five working days, 08:00 to 17:00
Us, as a client three hours ahead experiences us
By their Friday afternoon nobody here answers at all
two parties · four days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu
The same organisation, described twice. Only the first of these two rows has ever been written down anywhere.
Before moving another call into somebody's evening, it helps to workforce visibility for global teams and check how the work is actually distributed across projects and days.
A useful independent source for this part of the workflow is Time.is.
One approval held here for three days, and what sat behind it
Our approval of the revised drawing
3 / 2One of the three days was not a working day on their side: our weekend. Three days, and from here it looked like three days
The shop's cutting slot, which it released
8 / 6Two of the eight days were not working days on their side: the next slot was the following week. The shop had held it for us and could not hold it longer
The galvaniser's batch, which runs on Tuesdays
7 / 5Two of the seven days were not working days on their side: a weekly batch that the shop had booked into. Missed by one day
The sailing the whole order was built around
14 / 10Four of the fourteen days were not working days on their side: the next vessel on that route is fortnightly. Nobody had told us the sailing existed
four waits · 32 calendar days · 23 of them working days on the other side
Three days here became about a month at the far end, through three links none of which was visible from this desk. Everybody in the chain knew their own next step and nobody knew the whole of it. One team's own job.
Three days here became a month at the far end, and nobody did anything wrong.
The approval was held over a weekend. The shop released the cutting slot it had been holding. The next slot missed the galvaniser's Tuesday batch. The galvanising missed the fortnightly sailing.
Each link lost a cycle rather than three days, and the cycles are weekly.
Why delays multiply rather than add
A delay inside a continuous process costs what it costs. A delay that causes something to miss a periodic event costs the period.
Downstream of almost any supplier there is at least one periodic event: a batch, a slot, a sailing, a payment run, a committee. The further down the chain, the longer the periods tend to be, which is why a short delay at the top produces a long one at the bottom and never the reverse.
| Link | Period | A three-day delay costs |
|---|---|---|
| Our approval | Continuous | Three days |
| The shop's machine slot | Weekly | Up to a week |
| The galvaniser's batch | Weekly | Up to a week |
| The sailing | Fortnightly | Up to a fortnight |
The right-hand column is not additive in any simple way, and that is the point: what the chain does with three days depends entirely on where in each cycle those three days fall.
What is visible from here
One link. The shop said it would take ten days; the shop is taking ten days.
Everything behind the shop is somebody else's supplier, and it does not appear in any document on this side. The sailing in the panel above was not mentioned in the order, the acknowledgement, or any of the correspondence.
The question that makes it visible
Asked once, at the start, of whoever is directly downstream.
If something from us is late by a few days, what does that actually do to you? Is there anything on a weekly or fortnightly cycle behind you that we could cause you to miss?
Suppliers answer this well, because it is a question about their constraints rather than about their performance, and because almost nobody asks it. The answer usually contains one or two periodic events nobody on this side knew existed.
Once known, they go in the same place as the counterparty's working week, and they change the handling of exactly one thing: how late is too late.
The single date that matters
Out of all that, what is wanted is one number per counterparty: the latest date at which a delay from here costs them nothing.
Before that date, three days is three days. After it, three days is a cycle. The date is knowable, it is stable for a given kind of order, and it is worth more than any amount of general diligence.
It also changes what "urgent" means on this side. An approval due in a fortnight that sits in front of a Tuesday batch is more urgent on Monday than an approval due on Wednesday that sits in front of nothing.
Telling people when you are going to be the problem
If a delay here is unavoidable, the useful message says so early and asks the right question.
I am not going to be able to approve this before Tuesday. Does that cost you the slot, and if it does, is there anything partial I can give you now that would hold it?
The second sentence is what makes the message worth sending. Very often there is something: a confirmation of the dimensions that lets cutting start, an acceptance in principle, a release of the material. A partial answer frequently holds a slot that a complete answer two days later cannot.
What this does not mean
It is not an argument for approving things faster than they can be considered. A drawing approved without being read produces a far more expensive failure further down the same chain.
It is an argument for knowing which of the things on your desk sit in front of a cycle, and for giving those the hour today rather than the hour tomorrow.
The periodic events on your own side
The same structure exists in the other direction and is worth knowing for a different reason.
Your own organisation has cycles too: the weekly approvals meeting, the payment run, the Friday release, the monthly board. A supplier who misses one of yours by an hour waits a week, and nobody tells them which cycles exist.
Publishing them costs nothing. A line in the acknowledgement — "we approve drawings on Tuesday mornings, so anything with us by Monday evening goes through that week" — converts an invisible constraint into a target the other side can hit.
Suppliers hit it. The information is more valuable to them than almost anything else in the correspondence, and nobody gives it to them because from inside it is simply how the week works.