Technical Library
Most offshore programs that go wrong on schedule were planned with the transit time counted and everything else assumed away. Here is the whole picture, including the parts nobody quotes.
| Stage | Typical duration | What decides it |
|---|---|---|
| Feasibility and quotation | 1-2 weeks | Drawing quality. A complete print with tolerances and material called out gets quoted fast; an incomplete one goes round twice. |
| Tooling design and DFM review | 1-2 weeks | How many revisions the DFM feedback triggers. This is time well spent. |
| Tool build | 2-5 weeks simple 6-12 weeks complex |
Cavity count, slides and lifters, and whether the tool is a stamping die, a mould or both. |
| First articles and dimensional report | ~1-2 weeks after tool | Roughly 35 days from order for straightforward moulded and stamped parts. |
| PPAP submission and approval | 2-6 weeks | Submission level, how quickly your side reviews, and whether anything comes back. |
| Production run | 2-4 weeks | Lot size and where you sit in the plant's schedule. |
| Ocean transit | 14-21 days US West Coast 30-35 days US East Coast |
Port pairs and routing. Air freight compresses this to days at many times the cost. |
| Customs, drayage and inland | 3-10 days | Clearance, port congestion and distance from the port of entry. |
Indicative ranges based on our plants' actual performance. Every program is quoted with its own schedule; these are for planning, not commitment.
Once a part is tooled and approved, the recurring cycle is far shorter - production plus transit, commonly in the order of 50 days from purchase order to receipt, door to door, for established parts on a normal schedule.
The number that actually governs your planning is not the lead time, it is the lead time plus the reorder interval. A 50-day lead time on a part you release monthly behaves very differently from the same 50 days on a part you release quarterly.
"After receipt of order" means after the plant has a clean order it can act on - not the date you sent the purchase order. The clock usually starts once price, revision level, quantity, ship terms and any open technical questions are all closed.
If a quote says 8 weeks ARO and there is one unanswered dimension on the print, the eight weeks has not started. We will tell you when the clock actually started rather than letting you find out at the far end.
Practical advice. For a first offshore program, plan the calendar from the required line date backwards and add a genuine buffer at PPAP, not at transit. Transit is the predictable part.
How to use these tables. The values here are standard reference figures published to help you specify and compare parts. They are guidance, not a substitute for your own engineering standard, and several of them (torque above all) depend on assumptions about friction, lubrication and joint material that will differ in your application. Where a number matters, confirm it against the governing specification and against the part drawing. We will supply the plant's actual test data with any quotation.