What a lead time contains

What the quoted figure leaves out

Parker's sentence names five things, and a factory's figure covers none of them: purchase-order approval, shop-drawing approval, finish approval, cutting approval, delivery. Four of the five sit with the buyer and the design team. That is the uncomfortable half of the decomposition and it is also the half that makes the arithmetic work, because a programme that slips is usually a programme where two of those five ran longer than anyone had written down.

So the question worth asking at quotation stage is which of the six segments carry a date, who holds each one, and what happens to the others when one of them moves. A factory can answer that in a table. A factory that answers it with a single number has answered a different question.

The review clock is published, and it belongs to the design team

The Beloit Procurement Services package prints its own clock: five working days per review round, and five more for a resubmittal. Two rounds on a first submittal is ordinary rather than exceptional. Those days belong to the reviewing designer, and a production plan that does not carry them is a plan that will be wrong by the amount it left out.

The same document sets the condition for entering that clock at all: "Samples sent without a transmittal, project name, tag, and/or reference number will not be reviewed." An untagged sample is not slow. It is binned, and the round starts again when the replacement lands.

Laurie Dietrich of The Ness Group puts the pattern in capitals: "Fabrics and submittals ALWAYS take much longer than anticipated." The mill's own delivery of a strike-off or a cutting for approval sits inside this segment, and no factory controls it. The full sample and submittal sequence, gate by gate, is on the model-room page.

A quoted figure is not a reserved slot

Beyer Brown warns buyers that a quoted lead time "does not necessarily reserve production capacity." It is the sharpest sentence in the trade on this subject, because it separates two things a buyer reasonably assumes are the same thing: a number in an offer, and a slot in a factory's plan.

Ours is a plan with items and dates on it, and a quotation is written against what the plan already holds. A signed order and its deposit put the package into the plan. That is the commitment on this page: an estimate tied to a plan you can ask about, and a report when the plan changes.

What we say instead of a headline number

The sentence is: a current estimate against the production plan, reported when it moves. It is short, so here is what stands behind it.

A headline figure quoted at offer stage would have to cover segments we do not hold, and it would have to be quoted before the finish schedule and the fabric approvals exist. Both of those move the production date. Quoting through them is the mechanism by which a confident number becomes a missed one, and Parker's sentence is the record of buyers watching it happen.

The other failure is just as visible from the buyer's chair. A window running from a few weeks to several months answers the question in form and leaves it open in substance, and buyers read it exactly that way. The table above is what we can defend on both counts: every segment has a holder, and the ones with published figures carry the source in the cell.

The back half: consolidation, clearance and transit

Buyers already apply a schedule penalty to Türkiye here, and it is worth knowing its exact shape. arcedior's FF&E sourcing FAQ tells them: "Cross-border projects from India, China, Turkey, or the UAE should add 2-4 weeks for consolidation and customs clearance." Türkiye is bracketed there with two much longer sea routes, and the road corridor into Europe is the part of the picture that bracket does not see.

By road, published haulier tables put Germany, the Netherlands and the UK at 5 to 7 days door to door from the Marmara loading area, with the Kapıkule border queue as the single biggest variance in the figure. Gemlik sits about 250 km closer to that border than İstanbul does. Belgrade is two to four days on the same tables.

By sea, ONE's 2024 published NTX sheet gives a direct transit from Gemlik of 17 days to Felixstowe, 18 to Antwerp, 20 to Rotterdam and 23 to Hamburg. Read the date on that sheet before you use it, and read the caveat below. We quote it because it is published and checkable, and we ask the forwarder for the live sailing before anything goes into a programme.

Clearance is a separate question from transit, and it is answered by a document rather than by a day count. Which document depends on the destination: an A.TR proves free circulation into the European Union and proves nothing about origin, and outside the customs union the instrument is a different one. The import-requirements page is where that is worked through.

What you hear from us while the clock runs

Lauren Jacobsen, quoted in Business of Home, describes the cadence her own studio gives its clients: "We send our clients weekly updates, even if there have been no changes." The last clause carries the whole point. Silence during a production run gets read as bad news, and it is usually read correctly.

So the report goes out on a schedule rather than on an event, and it says which stage each item is at: carcass, finish, upholstery, packed. When a date moves it is in that week's report with the reason, and the revised estimate is set against the same production plan as the first one, so the two can be compared.

Photographs come with it, taken on the floor: the carcass on the assembly bench, the panel out of the spray booth, the bundle at the packing bench before it goes onto its pallet.

What happens on our side

The floor in Gemlik is 5,000 m² under our own production management. Machining, veneer, finishing and upholstery are in the same building, so a finish revision moves through one shop instead of five subcontractors, and its effect on the date is one number rather than five.

Packing and container loading happen at the factory, at the packing bench and the yard door. Nothing leaves the site between the saw and the container, which is the one part of the consolidation allowance we can actually act on: an order that is already a single consignment when it reaches the forwarder is not waiting on anybody else's cargo to fill a box.

Then the paperwork. Packing lists, the invoice, the proof of origin the destination needs and the loading photographs go out with the shipment rather than after somebody has to ask for them.