Your planning system has a blind spot — and it will never warn you about it.
Netstock and Slim4 store one static lead time per supplier. Blue Yonder and Kinaxis won’t take you under ~$5M spend — and still model a supplier, not a route. The moment your cargo moved Hormuz→Cape, your tool kept optimising against a lead time that’s now fiction. It won’t flag it. It just under-orders fast-movers and over-orders the rest until a shelf is empty.
Open your tool now: is lead time an attribute of the supplier or the route? If it’s the supplier, you’re flying blind — and so is every competitor on the same software.
02 — THE SIGNAL NOBODY’S NAMINGGCC buyers are sending far more RFQs to India and SE Asia suppliers than a year ago. That’s the diversification scramble, already moving — and alternative capacity is being booked out by your competitors this quarter.
The window to onboard a second source at normal terms: about one quarter before lead times and pricing on the “alternative” lanes climb too.
03 — THE CALL (DON’T DO WHAT YOUR PEERS DO)The reflex is “buffer everywhere.” Wrong — it’s the slowest, most expensive response. On a 60-day lane you wait two months to feel it. Segment instead:
Having worked the SE Asia supply side before the Dubai demand side: “just shift to SE Asia” underestimates how fast Vietnamese and Indian capacity saturates when the whole Gulf pivots at once. The obvious second source everyone’s calling will be first to quote you longer lead times. The smarter origin is the less obvious one — mapped lane-by-lane in coming issues.
05 — THE TRAP WAITING FOR YOUDo not unwind your buffer or cancel the second source on day one. Freight lags a reopening by weeks on vessel repositioning and backlog — and the firms that diversified keep pricing leverage they won’t surrender. The reopening is a trap for the impatient.
Reply with one thing: which lane are you on, and does your system model it at the route or supplier level? I’m mapping how exposed the GCC really is — your answer shapes next week’s read.