The agreement
Choosing a Supplier By Their Calendar
A supplier's working week, holidays and overlap are assessable before an order is placed, and they belong in the assessment alongside price and lead time.
Who is working when, for the people on this page
The supplier who quoted eleven per cent less
Two hours of overlap a day
The supplier who quoted eleven per cent more
Seven hours of overlap a day, and the same weekend as ours
two parties · five days of the seven are working days for all of them · Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri
The two quotations were compared on price, lead time and references. The right-hand column was in neither comparison and was worth more than the eleven per cent.
To keep remote-work decisions transparent, teams can the service website and discuss the resulting patterns together instead of treating activity as a private managerial score.
Teams can compare this approach with the established guidance available from Docker.
One order placed with two suppliers in successive years, and where its queries went
Supplier B, seven hours ahead, year one
63 / 4122 of the 63 days were not working days on their side: two Lunar New Year weeks and eleven round trips. Quoted eleven per cent below the alternative
Supplier A, two hours ahead, year two
44 / 3212 of the 44 days were not working days on their side: the same work, four round trips, no closure inside the window. Quoted eleven per cent above, and delivered nineteen days sooner
The engineering queries on the first order
21 / 147 of the 21 days were not working days on their side: nine-hour offset, one question at a time. Twenty-one days of the sixty-three were spent waiting for answers
The engineering queries on the second
5 / 4One of the five days was not a working day on their side: questions asked and answered the same day. The same questions, the same engineers, a different calendar
four waits · 133 calendar days · 91 of them working days on the other side
The cheaper supplier was cheaper. The order took nineteen days longer and a fortnight of that difference was spent purely waiting for exchanges to cross an offset. Neither year's comparison had a calendar in it. One team's own job.
Everything in the previous note can be assessed before placing an order, and almost none of it ever is.
The questions take ten minutes, the answers are given freely, and they are at least as predictive of how the job will go as the references.
The questions
Six, and they can be asked in one message during the quotation stage.
- Which days of the week do you work?
- What are your working hours, and who would our day-to-day contact be?
- What are your closures over the next twelve months?
- When something unexpected comes up on the floor, how do you normally reach a customer in our time zone, and how long do you wait?
- What can you decide without asking us, and what would you always refer?
- Is there anybody on your side who works an early or late shift?
Nobody minds these. They read as a competent buyer rather than a suspicious one, and the quality of the answers is itself information: a supplier who has thought about question four has customers in other time zones already.
What the answers tell you
| Answer | What it indicates |
|---|---|
| A precise closure list, volunteered | They have been caught before and have fixed it |
| "We are flexible" to question four | Nobody has a procedure and your question will wait |
| A named contact with shifted hours | Experienced with distant customers |
| Hesitation at question five | Every small decision will cross the gap |
| A six-day week, unprompted | An extra day you can use if you plan for it |
Putting it in the comparison
It does not need a scoring model. It needs a column.
Alongside price and lead time, write the overlap in hours, the week, the closures that fall inside the expected window, and the answer to question four. Four short entries per supplier, visible next to the numbers everybody is arguing about.
That alone changes decisions, because a supplier whose only closure falls exactly across your delivery window becomes visibly different from one whose does not, and no amount of discussion of lead time would have surfaced it.
The closure inside the window
Worth treating as a first-order question rather than a detail.
A quoted lead time of eight weeks that contains a two-week shutdown is a ten-week lead time, and the quotation will not say so. Suppliers generally are not concealing it; they are quoting a working lead time and have not thought about the calendar either.
Asking directly — "does your quoted lead time include your Lunar New Year closure?" — gets an honest answer and frequently a revised quotation.
What to do with the answers afterwards
They go into the record described in the first part of this collection, on the day the order is placed rather than at the end of the job.
That is the moment at which somebody has just asked all six questions and has the answers in front of them, and it is the only moment at which writing them down takes no additional effort.
The second-order effect
A buyer who asks these questions changes how the supplier behaves, before anything has been bought.
It establishes that dates and availability are being taken seriously, that the closure will be noticed, and that the response-time question will be remembered. Suppliers respond to that, and the response shows up in the first unexpected event rather than in anything said during the negotiation.
Comparing like with like
One practical trap in the comparison, and it accounts for a good share of the surprises.
Lead times quoted by suppliers on different working weeks are not comparable as stated. Twenty working days from a six-day shop is about three and a half calendar weeks; from a five-day one it is four. A quotation in calendar weeks and one in working days sitting in the same comparison are measuring different things.
The fix is to convert everything to calendar dates before comparing, using each supplier's own week and their own closures, and to do it on the actual start date rather than in the abstract.
That converts three numbers that looked similar into three dates that frequently are not, and the exercise takes about ten minutes.
The answer that is not about the calendar
One of the six questions does something the others do not, and it is worth knowing which.
Question four — how do you reach a customer in our time zone when something comes up — is not really about communication. It is about whether the supplier has customers like you already, and whether anybody there has thought about the problem before you arrived.
A supplier with a considered answer has been through this. One without will be learning on your order, which is survivable and should be priced in: expect the first two months to contain two or three delays that exist only because nobody knew who to ring.
That is not a reason to rule them out. It is a reason to put the handover and the standing-authority list in place on day one rather than in month three.