The agreement
What the Gap Is Worth In Money
On most international orders the time spent making the thing is a minority of the elapsed time, and the majority is distributed across items nobody prices.
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.
International teams need more than a time-zone converter, so managers can the current product page to connect calendar assumptions with the work completed around them.
For broader context beyond this collection, see the resources published by Python.
One order, and where the sixty-three days actually went
Work on the floor, start to finish
28 / 244 of the 28 days were not working days on their side: their Sunday is the non-working day. The only part anybody had estimated
Waiting for answers to engineering queries
21 / 147 of the 21 days were not working days on their side: a nine-hour offset and one question at a time. Eleven exchanges, about two hours of actual work
The closure that fell inside the window
9 / 0Nine of the nine days were not working days on their side: a national two-week closure, of which nine days fell inside this order. Published a year in advance
Waiting for our own approvals
5 / 4One of the five days was not a working day on their side: one weekend here. Four items, none of which took ten minutes
four waits · 63 calendar days · 42 of them working days on the other side
Twenty-eight days of making and thirty-five days of waiting. Only the first of those four lines appeared in the quotation, and only the first was discussed when the order was placed. One team's own job.
Sixty-three days from order to delivery, of which twenty-eight were spent making the thing.
The other thirty-five went on waiting, and none of them appeared in any quotation, any plan or any conversation at the point the order was placed.
The four buckets
Every international order of any complexity divides roughly the same way.
Production. The part everybody quotes and discusses. Usually estimated accurately, because the supplier does it every week.
Exchange. Time spent waiting for questions to cross the offset. Proportional to the number of exchanges rather than their difficulty. Entirely predictable from the offset and the complexity of the work, and never estimated.
Closures. Holidays and shutdowns on either side falling inside the window. Knowable a year ahead and usually discovered during.
Our own approvals. The bucket nobody wants to look at. Items sitting on this side, each of them a few minutes of work.
Estimating the second bucket before the job
Two numbers, multiplied.
How many exchanges will this job need? A repeat order with a fixed specification: two or three. A first article with engineering content: ten to twenty. A bespoke design with site interfaces: thirty or more.
What does one exchange cost? With a two-hour offset and a shared week, about half a day. With seven hours, a day. With a weekend that does not match, add a day for every exchange that lands near it.
Fifteen exchanges at a day each is three working weeks, which is usually more than anybody has allowed for the whole of the non-production time.
Reducing it
Each bucket responds to something different, and the responses are all in earlier parts of this collection.
| Bucket | What reduces it |
|---|---|
| Production | Price, capacity, the supplier's own efficiency |
| Exchange | Fewer, better-formed exchanges; standing authority; a daily handover |
| Closures | Looking at the calendar before quoting the window |
| Our own approvals | Answering the short things on the day they arrive |
The second and fourth are entirely within reach and are the two that nobody owns. Production is the supplier's problem and closures are arithmetic; exchange and internal approval are habits.
The internal bucket is the cheapest to fix
Five days, made of four items none of which took ten minutes.
That is the single highest-return item on the list, it requires no negotiation with anybody, and it is invisible unless somebody measures it. A supplier will never raise it, because telling a customer that their own approvals cost a working week is not a conversation most suppliers will start.
So it has to be measured on this side, and the measurement is simple: for each item the supplier waited on, the date they asked and the date they were answered.
Doing this once, after an order
The exercise takes about an hour with the correspondence open, and it is worth doing once on a completed job rather than continuously.
Lay out the elapsed days and attribute each one to a bucket. The result is almost always surprising in the same direction: production is the smaller half, exchange is larger than anybody expected, and the internal bucket is larger than anybody wanted to find.
What it changes
Mostly, what gets promised.
A team that knows its last order ran sixty-three days against a twenty-eight-day production estimate will quote differently to its own customers, and the quote will be right. That is worth considerably more than any of the individual improvements, because the damage done by an order running three weeks late is mostly done downstream, by a promise made on the wrong number.
Telling the supplier what you found
Counter-intuitive and worth doing, at least with suppliers you intend to keep.
Showing a supplier the four buckets from their own order — including the five days that sat on your side — changes the conversation from performance to arithmetic. It also gives them something they almost never have, which is a view of the whole elapsed time rather than their own part of it.
The usual response is a specific offer: a named early-shift contact, a daily note, a wider band of decisions they will take themselves. Those are the things that reduce the second bucket, and they are offered freely in a conversation framed this way and resisted in one framed as a complaint.
Including your own five days is what makes the difference. A supplier shown a tally that only counts their delays hears an accusation.