Lead Times – Their Behavior and the Impact on Planning and Control in Supply Chains

Abstract

AbstractLead times and their nature have received limited interest in literature despite their large impact on the performance and the management of supply chains. This paper presents a method and a case implementation of the same, to establish the behavior of real lead times in supply chains. The paper explores the behavior of lead times and illustrates how in one particular case they can and should be considered to be independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). The conclusion is also that the stochastic nature of the lead times contributes more to lead time demand variance than demand variance.