What is Delivery Time?

Delivery time relates to the amount of time a customer has to wait to receive their purchased bike.

Customers in some markets are willing to wait a short-while for delivery of the right product, while in other markets customers require immediately delivery. See Customer Preferences by Market Segment within the Market Information report. However, as manager of your company you should ideally ensure stock is always available to supply Retail Stores.

Which decisions affect Delivery Time?

Your job as manager(s) of your company is to ensure supply matches demand, meaning accurate sales forecasts, a complementary production decision, and sufficient factory capacity. Lost Sales are a good indicator supply is not matching demand.

Inefficiencies in the production process can also cause delays in delivery. This can be identified by a long Manufacturing Cycle Time (see the Manufacturing Responsiveness report). To rectify this you should review your Batch Size, Setup Time Reduction, Supplier Relations and Raw Materials Inventory decisions.

How do I track Delivery performance?

Delivery performance in MikesBikes Advanced is measured by the Delivery Index (0 being terrible, 1 being perfect). Previous and Current Delivery Indexes are listed on the Market Summary report.

Previous Delivery versus Current Delivery

Previous Delivery refers to the delivery performance for the previous period. It is shown because the simulation used this figure when calculating product demand for the current period. Your customers’ future delivery expectations are based on your past Delivery performance, not your current delivery performance.

Current Delivery refers to the delivery performance for the current period. This value will be used in the demand calculations for the year ahead.

How do I improve my Delivery Index?

Delivery performance is based on several factors.

  • If you produce enough to meet demand, then your delivery index will be high, as your customers generally can buy your goods as soon as they want them.
  • If you don’t produce enough to meet demand, then your delivery index will decrease as your customers have to wait for goods to be delivered to your retailers. ie. your retailers will stock out of your products several times per year.

Your delivery index will also be affected by how much excess demand you have.  In general, if there is only a little bit of excess demand then your delivery index will remain relatively high, and it will decrease by more as the excess demand increases.

If you can manufacture goods quickly and keep a reasonable number of weeks of finished goods on hand, then in general your delivery index won’t be affected too badly.

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