How Can Production Lead Time Be Managed in Operations

Lead time is the period of time between the detection of a medical condition by screening and when it ordinarily would have been diagnosed because a person experienced symptoms and sought medical care. The amount of lead time for a given disease is dependent on both the biologic rate of progression of the disease and on the ability of the screening test to detect early forms of the disease. Lead time is seek time plus rotational latency. Lead time may be calculated as the time required for n revolutions of the disk, where the seek time is greater than that time, but less than that required for n+1 revolutions of the disk, plus the rotational time that is required to move from the ending angular position of the active command to the beginning angular position of the subsequent command. Lead time is great to know especially if your going to be producing your goods by the order and you need to know lead time in order to quote a store with a delivery time. By producing clothing by the order you can take advantage of purchase order financing .

Lead time is the period between the pioneer's entry into the market and the appearance of the first follower. A longer lead time may increase pioneering advantages through helping the pioneer establish an even stronger brand name (Schmalensee, 1982) and moving customers' ideal points closer to the pioneer's attribute mix (Carpenter & Nakamoto, 1989). Lead Time is, in fact, the measure of efficiency in Lean Production, though it is more usually referred to as "effectiveness". Business Week, this week, has an article about GM and compares its' efficiency with that of Toyota by displaying a graph of the "numbers of hours to make a car" i.e. Lead time is an important performance metric for a product development organization. In this paper, we develop lead time models for product development organizations that involve multiple, concurrent projects with contention for human/technical resources.

Lead time is defined in Figure 1-7. According to the APICS dictionary, there are two key lead times: delivery lead time is the time from receipt of a customer order to the delivery of the product.

Manufacturers have implemented and will further introduce many different technologies, each in their own way. Many of the solutions have been invested in and developed over the past decade. Manufacturing lead time refers to the time span from material availability at the first processing operation to completion at the last operation. Manufacturing businesses need material to turn into sub-assemblies and finished product. Service businesses need material and parts to perform the service task.