Scheduled Shipments: How to Make Them Work for Your Business

Raise your hand if you can relate to any of these dreaded shipment situations:

1. You don’t need all of your order quantity right away, so you need to break an order into multiple future shipments.
2. Your boss tells you the company needs to avoid keeping an abundance of products in your facility.
3. You find yourself placing the same order over and over and over.
4. Something suddenly came up, and you need to delay an order for a single future delivery.

Our arm is tired. Luckily, DigiKey offers a solution for all the above situations. Enter: scheduled shipments!

Let’s examine three common scenarios where a company could benefit from the use of scheduled shipments.

Frequent Flyer Parts

The company in this scenario has an un-forecasted demand but uses the part(s) regularly and would prefer a better price. The purchaser would place an order at the higher volume tier required to qualify for the price break, requesting immediate shipment for the parts needed right away, and then schedule the balance of the product for a future date(s).

This scenario also covers situations 1 and 3 above.

Solid Inventory Forecast

In this scenario, a company has a firm forecast for the next 4-6 months and does not want to carry the extra inventory. They instead would prefer to place one order and schedule it to meet their timetable requirements. A distributor such as DigiKey would allocate the required inventory based on lead time and release/deliver to the customer at the requested time.

This scenario also covers situation 2 above.

Extended Supplier Lead Times

In this scenario, the company would like to lock down the inventory needed to meet their demand for the next 4-6 months without carrying inventory on their shelf. However, in the electronic component industry, supplier lead times are subject to change at any time.  So, working closely with DigiKey to keep up with supplier lead time intelligence, the purchaser would schedule an order to meet their forecast requirements and avoid any backorders.

This scenario also covers situation 4 above.

We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the many ways you could use scheduled shipments to customize an order to fit your specific needs. To save yourself time, money, and potential backorders, visit digkey.com to get the parts you need on your schedule.