Why the Lead Time You Were Quoted Isn't the Lead Time You'll Get
The number on your quotation and the date your goods arrive are often separated by weeks you didn't plan for.
The quotation arrives with a clear number: "Lead time: 20-25 working days." Procurement teams enter this figure into their planning systems, calculate backward from their required delivery date, and place the order with confidence that the timeline is understood. Six weeks later, when the goods haven't arrived and the supplier explains that production is complete but shipment hasn't occurred, the conversation reveals something that should have been clarified at the outset: the quoted lead time and the actual delivery timeline were never the same thing.
This gap between quoted lead time and actual delivery is not a communication failure in the conventional sense. It's a systematic difference in how suppliers and buyers define the same term. When a factory quotes "20-25 days lead time," they're typically describing the production duration—the time from when your order enters the production queue to when finished goods exit the production line. What that number excludes is often substantial: order processing, material sourcing, queue waiting time, quality control, packing, and the entire shipping journey from factory to your warehouse. The quoted number is accurate for what it measures; it simply doesn't measure what buyers assume it measures.
The problem compounds because different suppliers define "lead time" differently, and buyers rarely ask for clarification. One supplier might quote lead time from order confirmation to shipment. Another quotes from production start to production end. A third might include domestic shipping to the port but not international freight. Each supplier believes they're providing accurate information, and technically they are—but the buyer comparing these quotes as equivalent numbers is making decisions based on incompatible data. A "four-week lead time" from Supplier A and a "four-week lead time" from Supplier B might represent actual delivery timelines that differ by three weeks or more.
In practice, this is often where procurement planning begins to fail. The timeline built around a quoted lead time assumes that number represents the total duration from order placement to goods receipt. When it doesn't—when the quoted number covers only production while order processing, queue time, and shipping add weeks on either end—the resulting schedule slippage appears as supplier unreliability. The supplier delivered exactly what they quoted; the buyer expected something the quote never promised. Neither party explicitly misled the other, but the outcome is a missed deadline that both could have prevented with clearer terminology.
The bamboo cutlery industry presents particular challenges in this regard because the supply chain involves multiple stages with independent timelines. Raw bamboo must be sourced and processed. Production involves cutting, shaping, sanding, and finishing. Custom orders require artwork approval, engraving setup, and sample confirmation before mass production begins. Packaging—often sourced from separate suppliers—has its own lead time that may exceed the cutlery production itself. Quality control checkpoints can send batches back for rework, adding days that weren't in the original estimate. And shipping from Asian manufacturing hubs to New Zealand involves port handling, ocean transit, customs clearance, and domestic delivery—each with its own timeline that the "production lead time" quote never included.
The information asymmetry is structural. Suppliers know exactly what their quoted lead time includes and excludes because they work with these definitions daily. Buyers, especially those new to international procurement, assume the quoted number answers the question they actually asked: "When will I receive my goods?" The supplier answered a different question: "How long will production take?" Both questions are valid; the problem is that the answer to one was treated as the answer to the other.
Experienced procurement teams learn to decompose lead time into its constituent phases and request specific timelines for each. Rather than accepting a single number, they ask: How long from order confirmation until production actually starts? What's the current queue depth? How many working days for production itself? How long for quality control and packing? What's the shipping transit time to our port? How long for customs clearance and domestic delivery? The sum of these answers provides a realistic delivery timeline; the quoted "lead time" provides only one component.
Understanding the full scope of production timelines requires recognising that the quoted number is often the best-case scenario for the production phase alone. It assumes materials are in stock, the production queue is short, no quality issues arise, and everything flows smoothly. Real-world orders encounter friction at multiple points, and each friction point adds time that the original quote didn't account for. The gap between quoted and actual isn't supplier dishonesty—it's the difference between an idealised production duration and the messy reality of international manufacturing and logistics.
The practical response is to treat quoted lead times as one input among several, not as the definitive answer to delivery timing. When a supplier quotes 20-25 days, the follow-up questions should establish what that number includes, what it excludes, and what the current conditions are for each excluded phase. Is the production queue currently backed up? Are there any material shortages affecting this product? What shipping method is assumed, and what's the current transit time on that route? The answers to these questions transform a single quoted number into a realistic delivery estimate that accounts for the full order-to-receipt timeline.
The underlying pattern is that quoted lead times represent supplier-side metrics optimised for production planning, not buyer-side metrics optimised for inventory planning. Suppliers quote what they control; buyers need to know what they'll experience. Bridging this gap requires explicit conversation about definitions, assumptions, and current conditions—conversations that rarely happen when both parties assume the quoted number speaks for itself. The lead time you were quoted isn't wrong; it's simply answering a different question than the one you needed answered.