Time to read: 3 min
Fictiv’s Monthly Supply Chain Update series gives you insight into the logistics challenges, transit times, and related manufacturing issues we’re currently facing.
Happy holidays everyone! Christmas is right around the corner, and we want to update everyone on how we’re managing our supply chain to keep production moving and fulfilling orders as quickly as possible.
Holiday Shipping Capacity
Shipping capacity out of China remains limited — even more limited than a month ago — and we expect the situation to continue through Chinese New Year. We’re working with our manufacturing partners to craft a strategy for the holiday season that minimizes lead times and maximizes predictability. We’ll have more to share in next month’s update.
Stay tuned.
Holiday Shipping Time
Our shipping time remains 7 business days and we’re still delivering over 90% of shipments in that timeframe. That’s been our timeline since March 2020, and we expect it to continue to be so through the first half of 2022.
Holiday Manufacturing Capacity
The busiest time of the year has passed for our manufacturing partners overseas, so many have open capacity and can produce goods more quickly than normal. Customers with urgent needs can contact our sales team and we’ll take care of you!
The capacity in the US remains steady, and we expect domestic production to slow down around Christmas week.
How Fictiv is Maintaining Daily Shipping Volume
Because the logistics environment remains in flux, we’re moving and adapting on a daily basis to deliver orders on time. We’re evaluating every link in our supply chain to find creative ways to increase efficiency and speed.
Mix and Match Carriers
We recently added additional carriers, which has enabled us to maintain our standard daily shipping volume even as they remain hesitant to give us (or anyone else) dedicated daily capacity. Last month FedEx let us ship a few hundred more kilograms in cargo than they do now — airline capacity is maxing out, so they had to reduce exporter shipping volume.
Our shipments haven’t yet been delayed due to FedEx’s capacity restrictions since we’ve been providing them with forecasted daily capacity needs.
Freight Forwarding Partnerships
In addition to those carriers, we partner with freight forwarders to ship parts in aggregate with others’ shipments as commercial airline cargo. We have our own partners, but we also work with our customers and their freight forwarders as well.
Improved Document Transfers Reduce Customs Clearance Time
We were experiencing some delays clearing customs because transfer shipping documents were not all arriving in a timely fashion to customs agents. So, we partnered with our carriers to come up with a solution to increase document transfer reliability.
The resulting process has reduced customs clearance delays by 75 percent and allowed us to improve the reliability of our shipping lead times.
How You Can Help
We expect longer lead times as Chinese New Year approaches. So, we recommend placing overseas production orders as early as you can, and that includes customers who already have injection mold tooling and want reorders.
Providing accurate customs information after you complete your order — a detailed description of goods, end-use application, and correct HTS codes — is critical to expediting the process. Doing so makes the customs agent’s job easier, and gets your orders released from customs faster.
