In User Guides

Lead Times

Lead time is an essential metric across many industries.

Reliably calculating accurate lead times is crucial to avoid a supply delay, which could negatively affect customer satisfaction, contractor dependencies, and cost efficiencies across the board.

How to set up Lead Times in Inventory Management for WooCommerce

Lead Times can be set up on different levels:

  1. Default (all products in the store)
  2. By Supplier (managed in the Supplier pages)
  3. By Product (manage in the Product Management pages, or single product pages.)

Lead Time by Product takes precedent – if no value is entered, the calculation will fall back on the lead time value set by Supplier. If neither of these parameters are present, the default value for Lead Time is used.

1. Default Lead Time

After installation, all products in your store have a default Lead Time, which can be managed in the Settings / Forecast Settings:

By default, the lead time is set to 2 weeks, but this is of course dependent on supplier, product and perhaps even category.

2. Lead Time by Supplier

The second level on which you can manage the lead time is on Supplier.

In the Supplier settings, you can set a generic lead time for all products from this supplier;

The Lead Time by Supplier takes precedent over the Default Lead Time.

This means, if you have not set any lead time on a product level, this value will be applied for all products from this supplier. Also, if you have set a lead time by product for some of the supplier’s product, these products will use the product specific lead time. All other products assigned to this supplier will use the supplier’s lead time.

3. Lead Time by Product

The third level you can manage lead times on, is the Lead Time by Product.

The easiest way to manage the Lead Time by Product is in the Product Management pages:

Make sure you have selected the ‘Lead Time’ measure in the filter and simply update the value for Lead Time by Product.

If you have already set a lead time by supplier, this value will be present in this table. In this case, you can simply update the value by product.

WooCommerce Product Pages

Alternatively, you can edit and manage the Lead Time directly on the product pages;