Waiting
Waiting On Somebody Who Is Also Waiting
A counterparty who is slow is often a counterparty who is also waiting, and the chain behind them is invisible from where you are standing.
Who is working when, for the people on this page
Us, Hamburg, sending the chases
Chases get written on our Monday and our Friday
The supplier receiving them, Taipei
Our Friday afternoon is their Saturday, which is a working day
two parties · five days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri
The two days on which chases are habitually written here are the two worst days to send them to either of the counterparties in these notes.
International teams need more than a time-zone converter, so managers can the product overview to connect calendar assumptions with the work completed around them.
Teams can compare this approach with the established guidance available from Deloitte.
One answer, and the four waits stacked inside it
Our question to the forwarder
13 / 8Five of the thirteen days were not working days on their side: the three waits below, none of which we could see. From here this looked like a slow forwarder
The forwarder's question to the shipping line
9 / 6Three of the nine days were not working days on their side: the line answers bookings in a daily batch at 16:00 local. The forwarder had asked within an hour of hearing from us
The line's query to the terminal
5 / 3Two of the five days were not working days on their side: a weekend at the terminal and a public holiday at the line. Neither party had looked up the other's calendar
The terminal's query to the customs office
3 / 2One of the three days was not a working day on their side: one weekend. The only leg where nobody was waiting on anybody else
four waits · 30 calendar days · 19 of them working days on the other side
Thirteen days, of which the party we were dealing with controlled about two. Every chase we sent went to the one person in the chain who had already done their part. One team's own job.
The party you are chasing is frequently waiting on somebody themselves, and that somebody is waiting on a third party you have never heard of.
From outside, the whole chain presents as one slow counterparty. Every chase lands on the person who has already done their part.
The shape of it
A question goes to the forwarder. The forwarder asks the shipping line. The line queries the terminal. The terminal asks customs.
Each link adds its own working week, its own batch timetable and its own holidays. Four links with one weekend each and one batch cycle produces a fortnight out of perhaps three hours of actual work.
None of the parties is slow. The chain is long, and nobody in it can see more than one link in either direction.
Why it is invisible
Because the person you are dealing with does not usually say so.
Partly it sounds like an excuse. Partly they are trying to present a single point of responsibility, which is what you are paying them for. And partly they may not know the shape of it either: the forwarder knows they have asked the line, and does not know the line is waiting on a terminal.
The question that opens it up
Asked directly and without reproach, most intermediaries will describe the chain.
Is this with you, or are you waiting on somebody? If you are waiting, who, and do you know their working week?
The second clause is the useful one. An intermediary who has told you they are waiting on a line in a country seven hours ahead has handed you an explanation you can pass downstream, and has usually also handed you the next piece of information: the batch time, the holiday, the cut-off.
What changes once you can see it
Three things, and all of them are about where effort goes.
Chasing moves. There is no point pressing the party who has already asked. Either the pressure goes further down the chain, through them, or it goes nowhere.
Promises change. A thirteen-day chain is a thirteen-day chain. A date promised downstream has to be built on the whole of it, not on the part that is visible.
The cheap fix becomes visible. Often one link is carrying most of the delay, and often that link has a cut-off that could be hit with different timing at the top. Sending the original question four hours earlier can save a day at each of four links.
The compounding is the point
| Links in the chain | Weekends crossed | Typical elapsed, nine-hour spread |
|---|---|---|
| One | None or one | One to three days |
| Two | One | Three to five days |
| Three | One or two | A week |
| Four | Two | Around a fortnight |
Nothing in that table is a law. The pattern — that each link costs roughly a working day plus whatever calendar it drags in — is stable enough that a chain's length is a better predictor of elapsed time than the difficulty of the question.
What to do about long chains
The structural answer is to shorten them, and sometimes that is available: asking the line directly rather than through the forwarder, or asking for the terminal's cut-off once rather than querying it every time.
Where it is not available, the useful move is to ask the first question of the whole chain rather than the first link. "What will you need from me, and what will the line and the terminal need, for this to sail on the 14th" is one message that travels down four links in parallel rather than in series, and it is the only thing that reliably turns a fortnight into a week.
Being in the middle of one
The same structure, seen from the position of an intermediary, produces a specific obligation that is easy to miss.
If you are waiting on somebody and somebody is waiting on you, the useful message passes on the shape rather than the delay. "I am waiting on the line, who batch their bookings at four their time, so I will know tomorrow morning" tells the person behind you what they can promise their own customer.
"I have chased them" does not, and is the message that usually gets sent.
The reason it gets sent is that passing on the detail feels like passing on the problem. It is the opposite: a customer told the mechanism can plan around it, and a customer told only that a chase has occurred can do nothing but wait and chase in turn.