The Shortage Was Created Eight Weeks Ago and Discovered on Cutting Day
· 7 min read · Written by Faceela Research & Editorial Team
Reviewed by Ahmed Hassan Algammal — Founder and Enterprise Systems Consultant
The board is on the saw. The operator opens the hardware box for the runners and they are not there. Somebody walks to the store, then to the office, then to the buyer, and the buyer makes a call and comes back with a date four weeks away.
Nothing went wrong that morning. The morning is where it became visible, which is a different thing.
The requirement for those runners existed the day the shop drawing was approved. Every hinge on that drawing, every square metre of veneer, every profile and every sheet of toughened glass became a quantity with a date attached to it at that moment. What happened between that day and the saw is that nobody performed one subtraction.
That is the whole argument of this piece: a shortage in this trade is a scheduling event, not a purchasing event. It is decided by the programme and discovered by a machine operator, and the buyer — who gets blamed — is the last person in the building to hear about it.
Materials are most of the job
Start with the size of it, because it is the reason this matters more here than in most factories.
Materials are 55–70% of the cost of a job in joinery and fabrication. Not a third, not a line item — the majority of the cost. Which means the buying decisions on one job are the job's margin, and the timing of those decisions is the job's delivery date.
Set against that, the long-lead families in this trade run four to eight weeks. Blum and Häfele hardware, veneer, toughened and back-painted glass, special aluminium profiles, imported stone. None of this is exotic and none of it is stocked in depth by anybody in Al Quoz, because it is specified per job.
Four to eight weeks, on the majority of the cost, on a job that was sold with a twelve-week programme. Written down together, those numbers describe the problem completely.
One job, twelve weeks
The shortage was created in week one and discovered in week nine
Week 0
Order confirmed, advance received
The job exists commercially. Nothing has been drawn and nothing has been bought.
Week 1
Shop drawing approved
This is the moment the requirement becomes real. Every hinge, every square metre of veneer and every profile on that drawing is now a quantity with a date attached to it.
Week 6
Cutting list produced, job loaded onto the machines
The requirement is finally written out in the form a buyer could act on — five weeks after it existed.
Week 9
Cutting day. The board is on the saw
The operator opens the hardware box and it is not there. This is not the day the shortage happened. It is the day it became visible.
Week 11
Installation, as sold
The date the client was given, which has not moved and will not.
The window that decides it
The order had to leave the building here
Between week 1 and week 5
Cutting day minus the lead time. That is the whole calculation, and it is a production question with a purchasing answer — which is why neither department asks it.
Published lead-time band
4–8 weeks, on Blum and Häfele hardware, veneer batches, toughened and back-painted glass, special aluminium profiles and imported stone.
What sits inside the band
- Blum and Häfele hardware
- Veneer, matched to one batch
- Toughened and back-painted glass
- Special aluminium profiles
- Imported stone
Nothing changed between week one and week nine
No supplier let anyone down, no price moved, nobody was careless. The requirement was known in week one and the purchase order was raised when a person happened to notice. The shortage is a scheduling event, and it was scheduled.
The subtraction nobody performs
Cutting day minus the lead time. That is the calculation, and it has an owner problem rather than an arithmetic problem.
Production knows when cutting day is. Purchasing knows what the lead time is. Neither of them holds both numbers, and there is no document in most workshops on which the two are written next to each other. So the order is placed when a requirement reaches the buyer, and the requirement reaches the buyer when the cutting list is produced — which is weeks after the drawing was approved, because the cutting list is a production document made when production is ready to make it.
The gap between those two dates is where every shortage in this trade is born. It is invisible because nothing is late during it. The drawing is approved on time, the cutting list is produced on time, the machines are loaded on time. Every department hits its own date and the material still is not there.
A requirement that exists on approval and is acted on at cutting is not a slow process. It is a process with the wrong trigger.
Netting, and the second job nobody checked
The other half of it is that "do we have it" is a harder question than it sounds.
The honest version has three parts: what is on the shelf, what is already on order and not yet arrived, and what is already spoken for by another job. Most workshops can answer the first. Some can answer the second. Almost none can answer the third, and the third is where the expensive mistakes live.
The pattern is always the same. The store holds forty metres of a profile. Two jobs need thirty each. Both foremen look at the same figure, both are satisfied, and the second one to cut discovers the shortage — on cutting day, four to eight weeks from a replacement.
The reverse costs money too and makes no noise at all. A buyer who cannot see what is already on order raises a second purchase order for something already in transit, and the workshop ends up with a bespoke item in a bespoke finish that no other client will ever want. That does not appear as a loss. It appears as stock, which is the same problem as a stock figure that is wrong wearing different clothes.
The five families, and what each one actually does when it is short
They are not interchangeable, and treating them as one class of "long-lead item" is why a general shortage report tells a foreman nothing he can act on.
| Long-lead family | Why it is never a stock item | What being short of it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Blum and Häfele hardware | Specified per unit, per weight, per opening angle | Assembly, at the very end, when everything else is finished |
| Veneer | Must match across a run, and a batch is a batch | Cutting, and re-ordering does not fix it |
| Toughened and back-painted glass | Cut, toughened and coloured to the opening, and cannot be trimmed after | Installation, on site, in front of the client |
| Special aluminium profiles | Extruded to a section somebody chose from a catalogue | The whole unit, because the profile is the frame |
| Imported stone | Slab, block and vein, selected physically | Delivery, and there is no substitute the client will accept |
The veneer row is the one worth reading twice. It is the only line in the table where two correct deliveries of the correct item are still the wrong material.
Two deliveries of the right thing, and still wrong
Veneer is cut from a log. Colour, figure and grain vary between logs and between flitches inside the same log, so a run of doors faced from two batches does not read as one piece of furniture — it reads as a mistake, from six feet away, in daylight, to a client with no joinery training at all.
So the quantity is not the requirement. The requirement is the quantity, from one batch, plus enough spare for the panel that gets damaged in the shop and the one the client adds in month three.
A system that treats veneer as a quantity of square metres will report the job fully supplied and it will be wrong. The batch has to travel on the stock, on the reservation and on the purchase order, or the shortage takes a form nobody has a report for: everything present, nothing usable.
The same logic runs through the whole trade in weaker forms. A powder coat batch, a duco spray run, a stone slab selection. Colour matching across batches is not a quality problem discovered at the end. It is a reservation problem created at the start.
What to make a vendor show you
On a live system, on a real job, not on slides.
- Approve a shop drawing and show the material requirement for that job appear immediately, before any cutting list exists.
- Net that requirement against stock and against what is already on order, on one screen.
- Show the same requirement netted against another live job's reservations, and show which job the material is committed to.
- Take one long-lead item and show the latest date the purchase order can be raised, derived from the programme rather than typed in.
- Reserve veneer by batch, then try to satisfy the same job from a second batch, and show the system flag it.
- Move the installation date forward by two weeks and show which purchase orders have just become impossible.
- Produce, across every live job, the list of items whose order date has already passed.
Item 4 is the one that decides it. Every system can tell you what you need and most can tell you what you hold. A system that tells you the date the order had to leave the building, computed from the programme, is answering the only question that was ever going to prevent the shortage — and it has to answer it on the day the drawing is approved, not on the day somebody opens the folder.
Item 7 is the same question asked across the whole factory, which is how an owner finds out whether this is a process or a habit.
The short version
Materials are the majority of the cost of a joinery or fabrication job, and the long-lead families in this trade run four to eight weeks against programmes measured in the same units.
The requirement exists the moment the drawing is approved. The purchase order is raised the moment a person notices. Everything expensive in this article lives in the gap between those two events, and no department is late during it.
Netting against stock is the easy half. Netting against what is already on order, and against what another job has already committed, is where the second cutting day goes wrong — and veneer will defeat a system that counts square metres and ignores batches.
The shortage is discovered by a machine operator because that is the first moment anybody physically looks. It was decided weeks earlier, by a calendar.
How this runs as one chain — approved drawing, requirement, netting, order date, cutting list — is Flow, and the trade it was built for is on the joinery, steel and fabrication page. The neighbouring articles are the gate that creates the requirement in the first place, what happens to the sheets once they are on the machine, and material that leaves the building to be galvanised or coated and stops being visible.