Purchasing a tool from three thousand kilometres away and from thirty kilometres away are different problems, and the difference is lead time. Treat it as a price and the arithmetic becomes simple: a cheaper tool with a six week pipeline needs a buffer, and the buffer has a cost. Plan for it properly and the same tool delivers the price advantage without the risk of a cast house standing still.
What the timeline actually contains
- Production: often the shortest part. Standard geometries can ship from finished stock, while a custom drawing typically needs a short tooling and machining window.
- Inland and port: a few days to a week from factory to vessel.
- Ocean freight: the dominant block on long routes, measured in weeks.
- Clearance and delivery: normally days, but longer if documentation is incomplete – which is why the paperwork in the export packing guide is a schedule subject, not a formality.
The cost of the buffer, and the cost of no buffer
Holding six to eight weeks of consumption costs working capital, storage space and a little obsolescence risk. Running out costs a cast. For a two furnace plant drilling twelve casts a day, one lost cast is worth more than a year of storage for the entire tool set. The comparison is not close, and it is the reason a stock policy belongs in the same document as the price agreement.
Five planning rules that work
- Order by consumption, not by calendar. If you know your hole count, you know your monthly usage – see the consumable volume arithmetic.
- Split the annual volume. Two or three shipments a year keep freight per tonne down and release the buffer gradually.
- Keep one spare string per machine. Rods, adapters and connectors, not just bits. The part that stops a machine is rarely the part you stocked.
- Use air freight deliberately. Reserve it for genuine emergencies and price it into the annual plan rather than discovering it in a crisis.
- Qualify a second supplier. One source plus one ocean route is a single point of failure, whatever the price.
How a supplier can shorten the pipeline
Distance is fixed; the rest of the timeline is not. A supplier who keeps semi-finished stock for common rod profiles and can machine to drawing after the enquiry cuts weeks out of production. A supplier who quotes a realistic ship date, consolidates mixed orders into one shipment and prepares documents correctly removes days at the border. These are the qualities to test in the first order, because a supplier who is slow on a trial order will be slower at scale – and the signs are visible in how they answer the first technical question.
Read the same logic from the maintenance side: downtime reduction practices are mostly about having the right part, in the right condition, before the cast starts.
Making lead time a planning input
The most useful change is procedural: treat shipping time as a fixed input in the maintenance plan rather than a surprise. Publish the pipeline on the same calendar as the cast schedule, mark the point at which a reorder must be raised, and give the store a simple rule for when to escalate to air freight. Two or three scheduled shipments a year, sized to consumption, keep a cast house supplied without tying up capital – and without the emergency premium that a stockout always charges.
Frequently asked questions
How much stock should a plant hold?
Six to eight weeks of normal consumption, plus one spare string per drilling machine, plus a top-up before relines and blow-ins.
Is it cheaper to buy a full year at once?
Often for freight and unit price, rarely for flexibility. Two or three scheduled shipments usually beat both extremes.
Tell us your monthly hole count and destination port, and we will propose a delivery schedule with the buffer sized to your cast rate rather than to a container.