Low stock, and the next container is months away
Your best-selling line drops below its reorder level. The buyer places an order with the factory. The factory needs weeks to produce it. Then it waits for a vessel, spends weeks at sea, and more time at the port and in clearance. By the time it reaches your warehouse, you have been out of stock for a month, and your customers have found another supplier for the line.
Meanwhile, a slower line was ordered on the same schedule and is now filling a corner of the warehouse.
Why reorder points fail for importers
Simple reorder levels assume a short, steady lead time. Importing has a long and variable one, made of several parts: factory production, waiting for shipment, transit, port and clearance, and haulage. Each varies by supplier, season and route. Sales also change over that period. So a fixed reorder level is almost always wrong, and buyers fall back on experience and a spreadsheet.
| Lead time part | What makes it vary |
|---|---|
| Factory production | Factory load, materials, holidays |
| Waiting for shipment | Vessel schedules, consolidation |
| Ocean or air transit | Route, transhipment, port congestion |
| Port and clearance | Documents, checks, port backlogs |
| Haulage to warehouse | Haulier availability, unload slots |
What late reorders cost
Stockouts on core lines lose sales and sometimes customers. Emergency air freight to fill a gap eats the margin. Overcorrecting leads to too much stock of other lines, tying up cash and space. Buyers spend time firefighting instead of planning. And the business is always reacting to last quarter's problem.
Container economics add pressure. Factories want full containers and minimum quantities, so a late reorder is rarely a single line. The buyer has to pad the order with other lines to fill the space, and those lines are chosen in a hurry rather than because they are due. That is how a stockout on one product leads to overstock on three others.
Seasonal lines add another layer. Missing the window for a summer or Christmas range means the stock arrives when demand has gone.
The reorder planner we build
- Lead times are recorded per supplier and route, split into production, waiting, transit, clearance and haulage, and updated from your actual shipment history.
- Sales rates are calculated per product from your sales data, with seasonal patterns and known promotions included.
- The planner projects stock forward, including stock already on order and on the water, and works out the date each line would run out.
- It then works back through the lead time to the latest date each order should be placed, and adds a safety margin you choose.
- The buyer gets a weekly list of orders due soon, grouped by factory, so lines can be combined into sensible container loads.
- Orders placed are fed back in, so the projection stays current.
The planner suggests. Your buyer decides quantities and timing, especially where cash, space or minimum order quantities are a constraint.
What buying looks like after
Buyers see which orders need placing in the next few weeks, with the reasoning. Stockouts on core lines become rarer because orders go in early enough. Slow lines are ordered less often or in smaller amounts. And when a factory or route gets slower, the planner uses the new lead times automatically.
Recognise this pattern?
- You run out of best sellers while the next order is at sea.
- Reorder levels were set years ago and never reviewed.
- You use air freight to cover gaps.
- Slow lines pile up while fast ones run out.
- Lead times are in the buyer's head, not in the system.