EMS — 23 things I got wrong before I got it right
Posting this as a discussion rather than a claim: EMS — 23 things I got wrong before I got it right. A quoted lead time is a commitment you can evaluate. Measuring quoted against actual across several orders tells you more about an operation than the raw speed does. Median transit is the useful statistic. The minimum…
Why this board reports by lane and not by supplier.
Two members ordering from the same operation, in the same month, can see completely different transit times because they are on different routes with different carriers and different clearance points. Averaging them produces a supplier-level number that predicts nothing for either of them.
A lane — origin, destination, carrier, month — is the smallest thing that behaves consistently enough to be worth measuring. Once a route has a dozen reports behind it the median is genuinely useful, and that is what the tables on the source pages are built from.
Where the time actually goes, which I got wrong for two years.
Total transit is first mile, international leg, customs clearance and last mile. I had been attributing everything to the international leg because that is the part with the exotic-sounding name.
When I finally logged the stages separately, the international leg was the most consistent part of the whole journey. The variance was in clearance and in the domestic delivery at my end — neither of which the supplier controls. That reframed how I read every lane report on this board, and it is why the table separates the stages.
the last mile is where most of the variance lives
the last mile is where most of the variance lives
fatima_asante is right about regional stock. It changes the shape of the distribution, not just the mean.
ask which lines are actually held in the regional warehouse