Nobody notices logistics when it’s working

There’s a particular kind of job where doing it well means nobody mentions it. Logistics is one of those. If a delivery lands on the day it was promised, in the condition it left in, nobody rings to say so. If it doesn’t, a director knows within the hour, because by then somebody has an installer standing in a car park and an end user asking difficult questions.

I’ve spent more than twenty five years in freight, most of it long before I’d heard of an LED display. I started in a family freight forwarding business, learning exports when exports were straightforward and imports when they weren’t, and I’ve since built a customs department from scratch for a company that had always paid somebody else to do that work. What I’ve taken from all of it is fairly simple. Most delivery problems aren’t really delivery problems. They’re expectation problems, set weeks earlier, by somebody who wanted to give a quick answer.

That’s worth explaining, because very few people outside logistics have ever been told what actually happens between a factory in China and a reseller’s install date.

The five days that aren’t five days

Ask around this industry how long stock takes to come from China and five days is the number you’ll hear more often than any other. It’s been repeated for so long that it’s treated as fact. It isn’t.

Here’s the real sequence. Goods are ready on Monday, though ready tends to mean late on Monday, so collection happens Tuesday. Most of our suppliers sit in Shenzhen, but a lot of our product contains batteries or magnets, so we ship out of Hong Kong, where the frequency and transit times are better. So it trucks south. Then it sits for scanning. It flies Friday, transits, lands in the UK over the weekend, clears, and moves on to wherever the reseller needs it.

Nobody has failed at any point in that sequence. That’s simply what it takes. But a reseller working to the five day number has planned around a fortnight that doesn’t exist. They’ve booked an engineering team, their client has cleared a Saturday and turned off a shop floor, and when the screens aren’t there, nobody blames the airline.

The reason that wrong number survives has very little to do with China. We’ve all been retrained over the last decade by a different kind of delivery. Order something late in the evening and it can be with you before lunch, tracked at every stage, with a photograph on your phone confirming it arrived before you’ve noticed it on the step. That’s become the baseline for what delivery feels like, and quietly for what people assume delivery is, whatever is being delivered.

The two things have almost nothing in common. One is a small item in a fulfilment centre thirty miles away, inside a network built at enormous cost to make exactly that experience possible. The other is a pallet of display product travelling nine thousand miles from a factory that in many cases hasn’t built it yet, through an airport, a customs process and a flight competing for space with everybody else’s cargo. Nobody thinks those are the same when you put it to them directly. But nobody’s thinking about it directly when they ask how long something will take, and that’s when the damage gets done.

It rarely starts with anything more than a quick estimate. Somebody is asked for a lead time in the middle of a busy day. They know the honest answer needs caveats and a conversation, and they know the person asking wants a number, and that a short number is more welcome than a long one. So the short number gets given, and then it travels. Into a quotation, then a project plan, then an installation date a client has arranged their business around, and by the time anybody discovers the real timeline it’s been repeated so often it’s hardened into fact.

Which is why I’d rather give somebody an honest date than a comfortable one. If there’s a typhoon, nothing is flying or sailing. If it’s Golden Week, most of China is travelling, and a good deal of air freight moves in the hold of passenger aircraft, so the space travels with them. I’d rather say that in week one than week three. A reseller told nine days who gets nine days comes back. A reseller told five and given nine has been let down, even though the shipment did exactly what it was always going to do.

The same instinct explains something you’ll hear constantly in this trade. When a shipment from China runs late, you’ll very often be told it’s stuck in Chinese customs. In more than twenty five years I can’t point to a single delay genuinely caused by Chinese customs. They take time, because everything gets scanned and that costs a day at the airport, but it’s known and you budget for it. What actually holds shipments up is a factory running behind or no space on the aircraft. Customs is just the easier answer to give somebody who’s waiting.

What’s worth asking a distributor

If you’re choosing who to rely on for anything that crosses a border, there are a few questions I’d ask, and most people never think to.

Start with who does the customs work. Plenty of distributors can get cargo to arrive, but far fewer handle the entry themselves rather than passing it to a third party who does entries and nothing else. We keep it in house, and I do it. That matters when a shipment is unusual, because a subcontractor works with whatever’s in front of them and won’t ring you to say the paperwork doesn’t add up. It’s not the everyday work that tests it. It’s the jobs outside the template, like screens going into a vessel in dry dock, which is an export that isn’t going to a country at all, so the declaration gets made against the flag the vessel is registered under. Routine if you’ve done it before, a fortnight of confusion if you haven’t.

Then ask whether they can move product that never touches the UK. Cross trade is where capability shows. We’ve had cases purpose built at origin, shipped into mainland Europe and on to North America, and we’re running work now that goes from a manufacturer in China directly into another European market without entering this country at all. A business of our size doesn’t usually have the network for that.

Building programmes slip constantly, and a site that isn’t ready isn’t the reseller’s fault. Ours is a 90,000 square foot warehouse at Tewkesbury with twelve hubs around the UK behind it. It holds vendor stock and gold stock for service, it takes deinstalled kit back off a site, and on a rollout it means deliveries can be staged to follow the programme rather than arriving all at once into a room with no power.

Where resellers actually get caught

We sell through resellers and only through resellers, so most of this should never be your problem. Right up until the moment it is.

What catches people out is rarely the shipping itself. It’s the part either side of it, meaning who’s responsible for what, and at which point. Incoterms have governed that for decades and they determine who pays and who carries the risk, but an incoterm only works if the party receiving the goods can actually handle what’s being handed to them. A delivery term that looks generous on paper is worth nothing if the receiving business doesn’t have the registration to clear the goods at the other end. That single gap causes more grief than anything else I see, and it’s why we now work to a rule that sounds blunter than it is.

For smaller resellers especially, I know the customs side puts people off. VAT, import declarations, EORI numbers, all of it. Most businesses either don’t know where to go for help or end up paying a great deal for advice. You shouldn’t have to become a customs expert to sell a screen into Ireland, and you shouldn’t have to buy that expertise in either.

What to do instead