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.

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.

   

3. 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 CONNECTOR filters the rest of the results for further analysis:

   

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.

Monthly Leadtime Trends

With Monthly Leadtime Trends you can see the rise and fall of lead times for specific commodities, sub-commodities or manufacturers.

1. Hovering a specific month in the trend line provides average lead time in weeks.
2. Selecting one of the elements on the legend will emphasize that element on the graph while all other trendlines will be minimized, and the rest of the panels on the page will be filtered to just that legend item.
3. In the menu options, the up and down arrow allows the user to navigate between the commodity, subcommodity, and manufacturer levels. The maximize/minimize option allows the user to expand or contract the view.

Example: Connector Monthly Leadtime Trends

When (1) picking an individual commodity in the View By section, in this case Connector - then the Monthly Leadtime Trends will (2) filter down to the sub-commodities underneath the Connector commodity.

In this example data, we can see that the (1) Connector Rectangular sub commodity had a 5 week increase in lead time from the nine-month period of June 2022 to March 2023.

By (1) using the arrow to drilldown to the manufacturer level, we can (2) isolate the increase in lead-time to a single manufacturer in this example set.

This kind of analysis will allow you to more quickly become aware of extreme lead time outliers among your manufacturers who are potential candidates for alternative sourcing.

Heatmap: Leadtime by Category

Heatmap can be used to see the Median Lead Time (in weeks) for commodities and sub-commodities in a month-over-month basis.

1. The panel can be maximized, and the filter can be reviewed to confirm the data insight or raised up or down a level to toggle between commodity and sub-commodity.
2. In this example, we have set the view to show (2) Sub Commodity lead times month-over-month for a multi-year time series for Connectors.
3. Examining specific data for CONNECTOR_RECTANGULAR parts we can see a drastic increase in lead times during December 2022 which persisted until April 2023.

When you examine your own lead times, you should be able to identify trends in your data that bear out your historical experience as well as discover lead time trend insights that you were not previously aware of and be able to discern if your core commodities/parts will have upcoming sourcing issues.

Leadtime Channel Statistics

This chart will display lead time statistics for the data actively filtered across the time series.

The purpose of this chart is to allow comparison between the relative lead times of the item(s) in question over the following breakpoints:

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

This 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.

Resetting Leadtime Trends

Users can refresh their browser to reset the screen to baseline values and remove all existing report filters.

Learn More

If you would like to see this feature demonstrated, please check out our video tutorial:

• Leadtime Trends (Video)