TL;DR
- A lead time is not a fact you learn once. It drifts. The number you reorder off lives in your head or in an old email, and it went stale months ago. This issue is the operating manual for the free sheet that logs each supplier’s lead time, dates it, and back-calculates the exact Order-By date you need to hit your next production run, with a plain ORDER NOW / SOON / OK flag on every line.
- Your suppliers’ clocks are stretching right now. US delivery times are the slowest since 2022 and food inflation is reaccelerating, so the lead times you carried in from last quarter are almost certainly short. More in Ops Intel below.
- Your next action. Download the file, list your suppliers, and for each one log the lead time, a buffer, and the date you last confirmed that lead time. Enter when you need stock in hand. Then read the ORDER NOW line first. That is the order you are already late on.
A founder we worked with reordered their packaging right on schedule, the same week they always did, and still ran out. They had done nothing wrong by their own math. The problem was the math. The lead time in their head said six weeks. The supplier had quietly moved to ten weeks back in the winter, and nobody updated the number. So the “on time” order landed a month late, the fill line sat idle, and a retailer got a short shipment for a delay that was fully predictable a quarter earlier.
We have watched this happen on call after call, and it is almost never carelessness. It is that a lead time feels like a fact you learn once and file away. It is not. It drifts. A packaging supplier moves from six weeks to ten, an ocean lane adds two, and the number you plan against keeps pointing at a delivery date that no longer exists. The fix is not a smarter forecast. It is writing the lead times down, dating them, and re-checking them on a schedule. So we built the sheet that does exactly that, and this week we are giving it away.
Supplier Lead Times tab: log the lead time, a buffer, and when you last confirmed it. Enter the date you need stock in hand. The sheet back-calculates the Order-By date and flags every line ORDER NOW, SOON, or OK.
Need help with this?
A lead time is the first number, not a footnote
The part most founders miss. The lead time is not a detail you check at the end of planning. It is the first input everything else runs on. Your reorder point is built on it. Your cash-flow plan is built on it, because the day you place the order is the day the cash leaves. Your production calendar is built on it. Get the lead time wrong and every number downstream is wrong too, and you will not find out until the stock does not show up.
So treat it like the load-bearing number it is. A lead time that is two weeks out of date does not cost you two weeks. It costs you a missed production window, a short shipment, and a retailer call you did not need to have. The sheet keeps that number honest: written down, dated, and re-checked.
That is the whole idea behind this file. Stop reordering off a number you are guessing at. Reorder off a date the sheet hands you.
Who this is for
You are a founder running somewhere between five and twenty suppliers across packaging, ingredients, co-packing, and freight. You sell wholesale to retailers or distributors, and you do not have a planner or a procurement person tracking this for you. You know roughly what each supplier’s lead time is, but the number lives in your head or scattered across old emails, not in one place anyone can check. And you have missed a production window at least once because a supplier’s lead time moved and the planning assumption did not.
If that is you, this turns the guess in your head into a dated number and an Order-By date you can plan against.
What’s inside the file
A two-tab Excel workbook. Each tab has one job. If you are handing this article to an AI agent, read this section as the blueprint: it describes every part well enough to rebuild.
Read Me. The user manual lives inside the file: what it does, the one idea, a five-step how-to, the color key, and a prompt you can hand to an AI agent. Pink cells are where you type. Every other cell is a formula. You do not have to come back to this newsletter to run it.
Supplier Lead Times. One master list, one row per supplier. Per supplier you log what they provide, where they ship from, the lead time in weeks, a buffer in weeks, and the date you last confirmed that lead time, the Last Verified date. Then you enter the Need-By date: the day you need that item in hand for your next run. From there the sheet does the math. It counts backward from Need-By by the lead time plus the buffer to set the Order-By Date, reads that against a Today cell at the top of the tab, and flags each line ORDER NOW, SOON, or OK. Take the glass bottles in the worked example: a twelve-week lead time, a two-week buffer, needed by September 1. Count back fourteen weeks and the Order-By date has already passed. The line comes back ORDER NOW, in red, because the long lead time means you are behind before you even looked.
The Read Me tab travels with the file, so whoever opens it next can run it without you in the room.
How to run it
- Open the Supplier Lead Times tab and set the Today’s date cell at the top. The Order-By date and the status read from it, so it has to be current.
- List your suppliers. Replace the example rows with your own, across packaging, ingredients, co-packing, and freight. In the pink cells, type the lead time in weeks, a buffer, and the date you last confirmed that lead time.
- Enter the Need-By date for each line: the day you need that item in hand for your next production run.
- Read the Order-By Date and Status columns. ORDER NOW means you are already late. SOON means you are inside a week of the deadline. OK means you have room. Work the ORDER NOW lines first, top to bottom.
- Re-confirm your lead times on a schedule and update Last Verified each time. Monthly is a good default. The oldest Last Verified dates are the ones most likely to bite you, so start your re-checks there.
Pink cells are where you type. Every other cell is formula-driven. Do not type into a non-pink cell. The file will start lying to you.
Two ways this goes wrong
You log the lead times once and never date them. This is the failure the whole tool exists to kill. A lead time you wrote down in January and never touched is the same stale number that lived in your head, just in a nicer font. The Last Verified column is not decoration. It is the difference between a number you trust and a number you hope is still true. Set a monthly reminder, re-confirm with the supplier, and update the date. A lead time without a date is a guess.
You skip the buffer because the supplier quoted you a clean number. A quoted lead time is the supplier’s best case, measured from a calm week. It does not include the day they sat on your PO, the port that backed up, or the truck that missed its slot. The buffer is where you put the variance you have seen before, so the Order-By date has slack built in. Zero buffer means you are planning for a world where nothing ever slips, and you do not operate in that world.
Download it
🔗 Download the Supplier Lead Time Tracker. Open it, save a copy with your business name, and start with the Read Me tab.
The file is public. Share it with any founder planning a production run this quarter.
Make it yours: hand it to your AI agent
Our worked example runs nine suppliers for a bottled-sauce maker: glass bottles, pouches, labels, cartons, a few ingredients, a co-packer, and a freight forwarder. Yours is specific, and the suppliers, the lead times, and the dates should match what you actually buy. Good news: you do not have to fill it in by hand.
Open the file, then open ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever AI assistant you already use, and paste the prompt below. It will interview you about your suppliers for a couple of minutes, fill in the tracker, set a sensible buffer per supplier, and flag the lead times that look stale enough to re-verify before you plan your next run. Paste this whole article in alongside the prompt. The article describes the sheet in enough detail for the agent to rebuild it from scratch and adapt every row to what you actually buy.
**Copy-paste prompt:**You are helping me build a supplier lead time tracker. The sheet is one master list, one row per supplier. For each supplier I log what they provide, where they ship from, the lead time in weeks, a buffer in weeks, and the date I last confirmed that lead time (Last Verified). I also enter the date I need that item in hand (Need-By). The sheet then back-calculates an Order-By date, which is Need-By minus the lead time plus the buffer, and flags each line ORDER NOW, SOON, or OK against today’s date. The whole point is that a lead time drifts, so dating it and re-checking it is what keeps the plan honest.Before you build anything, interview me. Ask these one at a time and wait for my answer before the next:
- What do you make, and which suppliers do you depend on across packaging, ingredients, co-packing, and freight?
- For each supplier, what is their current lead time in weeks, and when did you last actually confirm that number with them?
- Where does each one ship from (local, domestic, regional, or import), since that drives how much the lead time tends to move?
- For your next production run, what date do you need each item in hand?
- Have any of these suppliers missed a quoted lead time before, and by how much? Once you have my answers, give me four things: (a) the tracker filled in, one row per supplier, with a sensible buffer for each based on where they ship from and how reliable they have been; (b) the Order-By date for each line and whether it reads ORDER NOW, SOON, or OK against today; (c) the lead times that look stale enough that I should re-verify them with the supplier before I plan this run; and (d) if you can create files, rebuild the sheet for me with my suppliers, my numbers, and the formulas filled in, so I walk away with a ready-to-use copy. If you cannot create files, lay it out as a table I can paste straight into the sheet. Keep it concrete. Use my suppliers, not generic examples.
Run that, paste the rows into the sheet, and the tracker is yours. If you do this, reply and tell us which lead time turned out to be the most out of date. We are collecting the best adaptations.
A lead time you wrote down once and never dated is the same guess you carried in your head, just in a nicer font. Date it, or it will pick the day you stock out for you.
If you run your own suppliers through this before your next production run, reply and tell us which lead time turned out to be stale. We read every reply.
OPS INTEL
This week in operations and supply chain:
↑ US supplier delivery times are the slowest since May 2022 (Supply Chain Dive, June 1). Manufacturing is expanding and the Supplier Deliveries index is stretching with it. This is the exact condition where the lead time in your head is short. Re-verify your import and ingredient lines before you plan your next run.
↑ Quebec food prices rose 3.5% year over year (CTAQ, citing Statistics Canada CPI, May 27). Food inflation reaccelerated to 3.5% in Quebec, ahead of the 3.0% overall rate. The cost side moves first, but supplier capacity and timelines move next, so treat a price letter as a prompt to re-confirm the lead time on the same line.
👀 Food and beverage makers rethink where to put their next plant (Food Dive, May 26). The industry is weighing retrofits against greenfield builds. Under 50M dollars, modernizing an existing plant usually pays back faster, but either way new capacity comes online slowly, which keeps the co-packing market you actually buy from tight.
↑ Target opens a 367M dollar food distribution center in Colorado (Supply Chain Dive, June 2). When your buyer’s DC replenishes two days faster, your case-fill and lead-time commitments get held to that new bar. Speed to shelf is becoming table stakes, and a missed Order-By date is how you fall short of it.
👀 US manufacturing hits its highest PMI since May 2022 (Supply Chain Dive, June 1). Demand is real, but uncertainty is the tax. Add capacity in reversible ways, overtime, co-packers, short leases, before you sign for fixed assets you may not need in six months.
Until next Tuesday. Write the lead time down, and put a date on it.
Ysi
Vantelira Inc.