When to place a new order with long supplier lead times
Default low stock emails fire too late for factories that take three to four weeks to deliver, guaranteeing month-long stockouts during peak seasons. This forces you to manually calculate daily sales velocity and weekly run-rates in a spreadsheet just to figure out when to restock. Relying on a 30-day average also fails if a product suddenly starts selling faster, making manual tracking a weekly nightmare.
What the numbers show
Counted from the threads quoted below. How we count
- People have been saying this in most months since September 2026.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
Found another way around this?
Share your steps and trade-offs so fellow engineers don't have to reinvent the wheel. No account required.
When to place a new order with long supplier lead times
- 1Building custom Google Sheets to map out daily sales velocity versus supplier lead timesDid this help you?
- 2Manually calculating weekly run-ratesDid this help you?
- 3exporting sales data and keeping track of stock in a separate spreadsheetDid this help you?
- 4using average sales over the past 30 days as a baselineDid this help you?
- 5using third-party tools to compare sales trends and stock levelsDid this help you?
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I'm finding it hard to get the stock levels right.”source ↗
“But i'm still not sure when I should actually place a new order.”source ↗
“I've mainly been looking at average sales over the past 30 days, but what if a product suddenly starts selling faster? And what if my supplier takes three weeks to deliver?”source ↗
“The problem? Our factory lead time is 3 to 4 weeks. By the time the email fired, we were already guaranteed to be out of stock for almost a month during our peak season.”source ↗
“Now I need to build a Google Sheet to map out daily sales velocity vs. lead times for our top 20 SKUs so this stops happening, but calculating run-rates manually every week is a nightmare.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 10Is it normal for vendors to take a week to respond?
- 3Taking customer orders right at closing time
- 16Why hasn't my online order shipped yet?
- 3Car parts on backorder for months
- 2Getting bounced between support reps after a delayed delivery
- 8Why are wedding invitations taking weeks or months to arrive in the mail?