Leadtime Trends Follow

Buyers, in their quest for supply chain optimization, place significant importance on gaining insights into lead times. These lead times, often measured in weeks, represent the duration it takes for a part to be delivered once ordered. This crucial metric allows buyers to make informed decisions by providing them with a clear understanding of the expected timeframes associated with different commodities and manufacturers. By discerning a suitable range of lead times within a specific subset, buyers can effectively streamline their procurement strategies and enhance supply chain efficiency.

Leadtime Trends

Viewing lead time trends allows buyers to determine if a given part is becoming easier or more difficult to source. Buyers want to stock up when lead times are extending. Buyers also want to know if they need to start sourcing alternate manufacturers or parts. Leadtime Trend provides awareness to inform this decision framework.

Leadtime Trends Navigation

Users can navigate Leadtime Trends in a variety of ways to get to the insights they are looking for:

1. The controls dropdown allows the user to pick a specific sub-commodity or manufacturer and the rest of the interface is filtered to only that type of information.

   1. These controls supersede the usual platform-wise scope filters at the top of the interface which should not be used with this feature.

   

2. A full or partial part number can be entered to look at only specific parts for lead-time trends. For example, the user can look at lead trends for part ABC123 or ABC456. If the user wants to look at all parts in the ABC part family, they can enter ABC and hit search.

   1. The part search is case sensitive to make identical matches, so if your part is loaded into the LevaData Platform as ABC123, and you type in aBc123, you are not going to make an identical match.
   2. Leadtime of MPN Searched will show median weeks of lead time for whatever you have filtered.

   

Market View vs. Market Leadtimes of My MPNs View

Leadtime Trends interface on either the left menu or the top tabs can be toggled between:

• Market View which are lead times reported in the market.
• Market Leadtimes of My MPNs View which is a curated view of market leadtime trends based only on the aggregated component manufacturer leadtimes for your MPNs.

Leadtime Trends helps you to understand changes in supply dynamics. You can choose the charts with the data perspective that makes the most sense to you with transparency of reported source.

View Market Leadtimes

Within View Leadtimes (Market or My), the Rows are three levels: MPN > Manufacturer > Distributor.

You can click a [-] to compress any row and click a [+] to expand any compressed row.

If you want to see all lead times 13 weeks or longer (one quarter) you can (1) filter the slider to 13-100 and the rest of the interface will update to see all items that exceed that duration:

When in "Market Leadtimes of My MPNs View" under View Market Leadtimes, you will see both Median Leadtime (Market) and Customer's Lead Time (Your Leadtimes). If you see distributors start to be out of sync, it potentially means there are new market dynamics occurring and this visibility provides early market change warning. Large negative differences in your lead time versus the manufacturer reported lead time indicate potential upcoming supply chain issues.

View by Sub Commodity

Users can click into a specific commodity or subcommodity in any part of the interface and it will filter the rest of the results. For example, clicking BATTERY_CHEMICAL filters the rest of the results for further analysis:

Sort by MPN Data Values (Signal Strength)

Sorting by MPN Data in any category shows you the values with the highest number of data points for confidence. This data point is included in the tables to allow you to corroborate the number of inputs forming this lead time estimate. If you hover over the "data signal" icon, you can see in a tooltip the exact number of data points.

View by Manufacturer

View by Manufacturer allows the user to compare lead time metrics for their manufacturers. If some of your main manufacturers are posting very high lead times for the part/commodity/subcommodity in question, then it may be worthwhile to consider sourcing alternate vendors or making further additions to your approved vendor list.

MPNs by Leadtime Groups / Leadtime Heatmap

In both of the right-most displays there is a pull-down menu to toggle the chart type.

Leadtime Group

Leadtime Group provides the proportion of parts that fall in a particular lead time range grouping to indicate how quickly you can re-supply inventory.

When you hover over the chart you can see a breakdown by range in exact percents for the time period.

You can filter any preceding View by element on the left-hand navigation, for example picking a Manufacturer who has a median lead time of only 6 weeks updates the MPNs by Leadtime Groups chart to indicate that 96%+ of the MPNs supplied by that manufacturer fall in the 1-to-12-week lead time range.

Leadtime Heatmap

Leadtime Heatmap is a visual mapping which can be toggled between commodities and manufacturers to understand and compare their lead time health. Trend directions help users to make informed forecasts about procurement decisions.

Filtering the Leadtime Heatmap down by any the preceding views allows you to make direct comparisons. For example, selecting Battery_Chemical in the View by Commodity interface and then drilling down to the sub_commodity level in the Leadtime Heatmap interface allows you to directly compare the Battery_Primary and Battery_Secondary subcommodities head-to-head on month-by-month lead times.

Leadtime Channel Statistics (Range) / Leadtime Trends

Leadtime Range provides an indication of what lead time values to expect within a range of most likely values:

• minimal lead times (10th Percentile - Green)
• median lead times (50th Percentile - Blue)
• maximal lead times (90th Percentile - Red)

This chart, like the others, is continuously filtered based on user selection across the interface. It assists with early detection of trend changes where long lead times get longer or short lead times get shorter and will eventually impact the majority of parts in that filter so a user can proactively plan ahead.

Selecting any item in the View by panels (e.g. a manufacturer) will filter the View Leadtimes to that manufacturers parts and show the Leadtime Range for only the one manufacturer.

In this example above, we can see a specific time (June 2022 to January 2023) where around 12-14% of the manufacturer's parts had lead times of over a year (indicating a supply shock) and then a very normal range of lead times both before and after this extreme event.

Leadtime Trends

Leadtime Trends is a visual time-series chart to see median lead time in weeks. This chart presents and emphasizes trend acceleration in a more dramatic way to inform forecast and procurement decisions. The granularity is available at a Commodity, Sub Commodity, or Manufacturer level via up/down toggle.

To use these multiple views simultaneously, one can for example (1) pick a commodity (i.e. Power_Supply) and (2) use the arrows to set the Leadtime Trends Chart to Sub Commodity level to see those trends over time for the sub commodities under Power Supply.

In (3) View by Manufacturer (above) we can see which manufacturers fall within this commodity selection, and they will also be charted over time in Leadtime Trends if the user drills down further to the Manufacturer level (below)

Resetting Leadtime Trends

• Users can click into a previously selected/filtered interface element to deselect it and remove the filter on the rest of the interface.
• If multiple selections have been made, users can refresh their browser to reset the screen to baseline values and remove all existing report filters.

Conclusion

Leadtime Trends helps to baseline acceptable ranges for lead times within specific criteria in order to bolster future sourcing plans. This enables users to plan out appropriate timeframes to guarantee supply. When lead time trends are increasing to unacceptable levels, having this insight informs the strategic decision to seek alternate sourcing.