Top important question:
How many days do you need to wait from the day you place an order until the moment your products arrive at your warehouse? This is a tricky question I know.. And actually
of course it all depends from the distance and the type of transport of the goods!
In fact I deliberately posed the question in the wrong way.
The right wording for the questions would be
- What’s your supplier lead time?
- How many days go from the day you place an order till the moment your products LEAVE YOUR SUPPLIER’s warehouse?
These are the key questions!
From these parameters you can evaluate your supplier reactiveness
In the various Countries where Saporalia operates I hear many different values: the answer to the question may vary from 3-5 days for more structured Companies up until even 10-15 days for smaller Enterprises, plus of course the time that it will take for the goods to be transported and delivered to you
I think this is an important aspect because the faster your supplier is in refurbish your warehouse, the better is the situation you will have in terms of avoiding problem with your stock and also for you to have a sustainable management of products’ quantities in your warehouse in order to not increase your stock too much.
Fact: you may (or may not) know that in Italy stock is taxed by authorities and by government (I am not aware this is the case in any other country, please do let me know if you have the same problem as I am curious) so all the producers and exporters tend to have stock at real minimum level and manage the production and the acquisition of the products only once they receive the new order from the Customers
This of course doesn’t help your stock management and make the products delivery timing a bit too long --> Not good!
At Saporalia when we start co-operation with new Customers, we try to identify the recurrence of ordered products’ quantities (not only the ordering frequency which is not always in our or your control, but defining a sort of standard ordered quantity) and when this is defined, we will make sure our warehouse will always have that quantity of the products you may/will order plus 30% of them in case you need more
Obviously we are taking some risks here because a Customer may not order those products, but I can tell you this made the difference with a lot of our Customers in terms of timing in sending the goods when receiving the new order
In fact in those cases when we have a sort of standardized order taking path for the products you are getting from us, we can let the goods leave our warehouse the same day when receiving the order in the morning till 12 (CET – Central Europe Time zone), or the day after if the order arrive when it is already afternoon for us
It has to be emphasized that another important value to take into consideration is the shelf life, of course for short shelf life products keeping stock is not possible without a strict plan, but in most of our products shelf life is 36 months so we make this possible nearly always
So, what about you? Are you happy with If not, please answer to this email andwe’ll send it to you immediately
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