Job 1142 is scheduled to run tomorrow. The material is EN8 rod, ø32 mm, 1200 mm length. You ordered it last week. Is it here? The planner emails the warehouse. The warehouse checks. Half the order is here. Half is not. When will the second half arrive? The supplier says Friday, maybe Monday. The planner now has to move Job 1142 by three to five days, which cascades to three other jobs.
Except nobody told the customer that the delivery date changed. The customer expects the parts Friday. By the time you call, the customer is angry and threatening to go elsewhere.
You do not have visibility into material
Most custom manufacturers track material in one of three ways. First: ask someone. The planner calls the warehouse every time he needs to know where something is. Second: check the ERP. The ERP says the order is open, but it does not say if the material has arrived. Third: hope. The material arrived when it was supposed to, so it should be here.
None of these methods work. Ask someone is slow and interrupts a warehouse person. Check the ERP is lying — the material is on the dock but not logged in. Hope is a strategy that fails every week.
So the planner makes the schedule without knowing where the material is. He assumes it arrives on time. Half the time it does not. When it doesn't, he scrambles to reschedule, usually late — too late to tell the customer, too late to make good use of the machine time.
The hidden cost
A material delay that you don't see until it is too late costs you a day of machine time. The machine sat idle waiting for material, burning allocation without earning revenue. The operator was paid for standing around. The customer is angry because the job is late.
That day cost you 15–20k rupees. But it doesn't show up as a material cost. It shows up as inefficiency. The margin on that day's worth of machine time evaporates.
A shop with 12 machines loses one machine-day a week to material delays. That is 12 machine-days a month. If the shop makes 500k rupees a day of gross margin, that is 6 million rupees a month of preventable loss.
Why suppliers don't tell you
Your supplier doesn't tell you the material is delayed. Either the supplier doesn't know himself — it is stuck at his supplier. Or the supplier thinks it will arrive tomorrow so why call. Or the supplier is hoping to slip it in late but close enough that you cannot complain.
You find out when you need it, not when the supplier knows it is delayed. By then, there is nothing to do but reschedule or pay a premium for expedited shipping.
What changes if you have visibility
- The moment material arrives, you know. You can start a job early or confirm it is on track for tomorrow
- If material is going to be late, you know days ahead. You can reschedule proactively, before the job was supposed to start
- You can tell the customer the material arrived, and the job will ship as promised — not scramble at the last minute
- Your schedule is based on what is actually here, not what you hope is here
Real-time material visibility seems like a nice-to-have. It is actually margin-critical. The cost of one material delay hiding until it is too late is bigger than the cost of building the system to see it coming.