Supplier performance drift

Suppliers do not usually fail suddenly. They drift — acknowledgements take a day longer than they used to, lead times quietly stretch, the on-time rate slips from ninety-five percent to eighty. This Watch measures each supplier against its own history and tells you when the trend turns. In Settings → Workspace → Watches it sits under Pattern Recognition as PA-2.

What it watches for

A supplier whose numbers are getting worse against their own baseline, across four measures:

• How long they take to acknowledge a purchase order.
• Their actual lead times, as opposed to their published ones.
• Their on-time rate.
• How often their shipments come up short, and how often you have to ask them for a credit.

Why it matters

The comparison is against the supplier's own past, not against other suppliers — which is the only fair way to do it, because a decorator with a two-week lead time is not worse than one with a three-day lead time, it is a different kind of supplier. What matters is the change. A supplier whose lead time has stretched by four days is a supplier whose next three quotes are being priced and dated wrong, and you will find out one job at a time unless somebody is counting.

This Watch books as Avoided on the Found ledger. It usually books that value indirectly, through the dates and rush charges the other Watches save once they are working from accurate lead times.

What it needs connected

• One required: a supplier feed or a mailbox. Either can carry the history — the supplier's own records, or the trail of confirmations and shipping notices in your mail.
• Helpful: your accounting system.

This Watch needs history to work with. A supplier you have used twice does not have a baseline yet, and Scout will not pretend otherwise.

What the point looks like

A point is one item Scout raises with the proof behind it. This one is an observation — something to know rather than something to do — so it arrives in the Inbox under Worth knowing rather than Needs you:

Alpha Apparel is acknowledging orders more slowly than they used to — Alpha Apparel · last 90 days

Across your last twelve orders, Alpha Apparel's acknowledgement time has gone from a median of 6 hours to a median of 2.2 business days, and two of the last five orders shipped after their promised date. Their published lead time is still 10 business days; the actual median across those twelve orders is 13.

Evidence: twelve purchase orders with their acknowledgement and ship timestamps · the supplier's published lead time · the median comparison.

The settings that tune it

None. Its settings block reads No adjustable thresholds.

When it arrives

This is a second-wave Watch. It is not raising points today — its row in Settings reads Coming soon. You can turn it on now; there is nothing else to configure. We do not publish a date for it.

Good to know

• This Watch also writes the learned lead time the quote-and-date Watches use, which is why it improves their accuracy as well as your supplier conversations.
• It is an observation, not a task. There is nothing to handle — it is there so you can move a job, renegotiate, or start qualifying a second source.
• Because it is a pattern Watch, it reads history rather than single messages. One late order is not drift.
• A single order that is running late right now is SI-3, production delay.
• The customer-side equivalent — an account whose ordering rhythm is changing — is PA-1, reorder windows.