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Time is an increasingly important element in logistics strategy development. Service reliability and performance can give a real competitive edge. They can also reduce inventory and total distribution costs. Marketeers are now looking to distribution to ‘add value’. Alan Braithwaite of Logistics Consulting Partners describes the use of a new software tool STELLA which can be applied to provide the time dimension in planning logistics.

Time is a business commodity which has an enormous opportunity cost. Yet normal business controls make no attempt to value or identify the scale or nature of this. In this paper Professor Martin Christopher and Alan Braithwaite introduce the concept of Strategic Lead Time Management as a means of measuring and valuing the time efficiency of business.

‘Time has ceased, “space” has vanished. We now live in a global village…a simultaneous happening’.Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, Bantam Books, USA, 1967

Integrating business processes across functions is at the heart of logistics and supply chain management. The fundamentals of compressing time across the chain are well understood. There is a common expectation among logistics professionals that cost will fall out of the supply chain from such programs. The theme of supply chain management is that many businesses are not in the trade‐off zone where cost must be balanced against service, but are in the area where good supply chain practice can drive service up and cost down simultaneously.

A consultant looks at the strategies employed to develop service parts logistics.

Examines an issue of fundamental importance to marketing and manufacturing companies – how to implement more customer focus and responsiveness through better management of their supply chains. Aimed at senior management frustrated by their company′s inability to make real breakthroughs in this arena, while at the same time scared‐stiff of possible and catastrophic breakdown in supply through imposed change that the company cannot accommodate. Offers some ideas on how control and responsiveness can be achieved in logistics through supportive systems improvements. By “logistics” we are generically describing far more than just physical goods movement.

Outlines the challenges facing companies which are trying to address the new requirements in information technology. Develops a new framework to approach the issues which contradicts much of the accepted wisdom of systems implementation in the logistics area.

Accepted logistics theory states that short lead times are consistent with high accuracy of customer service and low levels of inventory. Yet global or theatre based manufacturing strategies are lengthening lead times, extending supply chains and increasing risk of both excessive inventory and poor customer service. Logistics strategies to manage the conflicting interests of manufacturing and marketing and distribution have proved difficult to evolve. Strategic Lead Time Management is a computer modelling approach designed to identify and maximize the value added: cost added ratio in supply chain design. It is based on simulating the relationship between organisational process and procedure and the flow of inventory through the supply chain. This paper describes the approach and the results that can be achieved.