Supplier Lead-Time & Delivery-Performance Tracker: Stop Planning on Lead Times Your Suppliers Never Hit

The problem this kills

Your reorder points and safety stock are built on a number you typed into the item master a long time ago: the supplier's quoted lead time. Two weeks, the rep said. So your planning assumes two weeks. But the receiving dock tells a different story — half those POs land in nineteen days, some in thirty, and one supplier hasn't hit their quote since last spring.

Nobody planned for that, so the math is quietly wrong everywhere. You reorder too late and stock out. You expedite to cover the gap and blow the freight budget. You carry extra safety stock on suppliers who are actually reliable, and not enough on the ones who slip. And when someone asks "which suppliers are dragging us?" the honest answer is "I think I know, but I can't prove it." The dates to prove it already exist — they're sitting in your PO and receiving exports. They've just never been turned into the one number that matters: how long this supplier really takes. You do not need to be a developer to fix this.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool that turns raw dates into realistic planning numbers. You import your PO lines — for each one, the date you ordered, the date the supplier promised, and the date you actually received it. The tool computes the real lead time for every line (order date to receipt date), then rolls it up per supplier and item into the numbers planners actually need: average actual lead time, how much it varies, and on-time percentage against what was promised. It distinguishes a supplier slipping their promise from an internal delay (you ordered late), so suppliers aren't blamed for your own timing. It uses a sensible window and excludes obvious anomalies — the one PO that took 200 days because it got lost — so a freak event doesn't poison the average.

Then it compares the real lead time to the lead time you currently assume in the item master and recommends an adjusted number where they diverge. A planner reviews each recommendation, approves the ones to apply, and only then does the tool produce a clean CSV to update your item master in the exact columns your system expects — plus a supplier reliability dashboard you can take to scorecard reviews.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — your ERP and receiving systems, the exact columns and date formats in your PO export, how you name suppliers and code items (SKU / part-number conventions), your typical and peak PO volumes, what counts as "on time," how long a window to measure, which anomalies to exclude, and how you tell a supplier delay apart from an internal one — so the tool is tailored to your data, not a generic template. From there it walks the agent through the data model, the import and dedupe, the lead-time and reliability calculations, the recommendation logic, the planner approval gate, and the item-master export. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a "No API yet?" path: import your dates from a Google Sheet or CSV and export updated lead times as a clean CSV — so you can build and use the whole tool today, with no integration to your ERP at all.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

The whole reason to do this in a real tool instead of a spreadsheet is the controls it bakes in: login so only your planning and procurement team can use it; row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's data; a complete audit trail of who imported, computed, approved, and exported what, and when; a hard human-approval gate where a planner reviews every recommended lead-time change and approves it before anything is written toward the item master — the analysis suggests, the planner confirms; and duplicate guards so the same PO line can't be counted twice in the facts, and each supplier-and-item pair carries exactly one current recommendation.

Who it's for

Planners and buyers whose reorder math runs on optimistic quoted lead times the supplier never actually hits — and who suspect a few suppliers are chronic slippers but can't prove it with numbers. If you can export PO, promised, and receipt dates, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer a few questions about your data. Your first honest lead-time number is minutes away.