What is the lead time?
In general, lead time is the time taken or the amount of time from the start of a process to its conclusion. There are different types of lead time in Odoo: customer lead time, vendor lead time, manufacturing lead time, and security lead time. By reducing lead time, we can improve productivity, increasing output and revenue. So, in this blog, we are discussing customer lead time and security lead time for sales and their practical benefits.
Customer lead time for sales on Odoo 17
We are all interested in online shopping, as there is no rush compared to shops, and we get those products in our doors within days. But when those products show up later than the expected date, it's the worst thing, and the customer loses trust in the company. So no more customers are interested in shopping from that company, and the company loses its customers.
Here, Odoo 17 provides the feature ‘Customer lead time’ to avoid such issues faced by the companies. The companies can properly use the Customer lead time feature to avoid these problems.
Customer lead time is the number of days to deliver a product to a customer. Customer lead time helps us to schedule the delivery date or delivery time precisely.
For example, when we set 10 days as customer lead time and when a customer places the order, the items will be delivered to the customer within 10 days. We can provide this feature to individual products from the sales module. So go to the sales module and click on the products menu, then click on the products sub-menu.
There we found a list of products and selected one of the products from there. Go to the inventory tab of that product form. We can see an option, ‘Customer lead time’ and enter the customer lead time there and save it.
Now go to the ‘Orders’ menu and click the orders submenu. We are able to create new sales orders there. Create a new sales order by clicking the New button on that sales orders page. Create a new sales order, that provides the customer name, and under the ‘order lines', add the product for which we have set the lead time. After that, confirm the order.
After the product has been selected, confirm the sales order. When we confirm the sale order we can see the ordered date, “05/03/2024 15:43:58” which is the date on which the order has been created.
We can go to the other info tab of the same sales order and there we can see that under the delivery section the “Delivery date ? Expected: 05/13/2024 15:43:58“ which is correctly 10 days after the ordered date that we just configured on the product form.
Next, we can see a delivery smart tab on the same page. Click on the Delivery smart tab and we reach the delivery order and we can see the delivery details related to this sale order. The same lead time information is reflected in the scheduled date of the delivery order.
In conclusion, we can say that when we set a customer lead time in the Odoo 17 Sales Module, the product is delivered to the customer on time without any delay, which increases the company's productivity and revenue.
Security lead time for sales in Odoo 17
Security lead time for the sales in Odoo helps to add extra days to the expected delivery date. This works on the delay that may occur on delivery of the product and ensures the customer receives their item on time, that is, when we use the delivery lead time feature, the product will be delivered to the customer earlier than the expected delivery date. For example, when the delivery of a product is expected on 13th May, and there is a pre-configured security lead time of 2 days, then the delivery order is expected to arrive on 10 May.
To set up this, first, we can go to the inventory application of Odoo. Click on the configuration settings of the inventory application. Under the advanced scheduling section, there is an option to enable the security lead time for sales, and there, we can add the number of days that we want to set as a security lead time. Here, we have set 3 days as the security lead time and saved it.
Then go back to the sales module, create a new sales order, and confirm the sales order. Then the ordered date will be today's date, and when we go to the other info tab and in the delivery section, the delivery date will be the same as in the previous case, which is 10 days after the ordered date.
Next, we can click on the delivery smart tab, and in the scheduled date, we can see that three days from the expected delivery date have been reduced and a new scheduled date has been calculated by Odoo 17.
Here, we have set the security lead time as 3 days, so 3 days have been reduced from the expected delivery date and the customer will receive the product 3 days before the expected date.
When the customer receives the item earlier than the expected date the impression to the customer about the company will increase. Thus the customer increases his interest to shop more from that company.
So in conclusion, when the customer lead time option is used while selling a product the company can gain customer satisfaction, more accuracy in inventory management of the product, and also make a company's delivery schedule planning easy.
To read more about How to Use Security Lead Time in Odoo 17 to Avoid Delays, refer to our blog How to Use Security Lead Time in Odoo 17 to Avoid Delays.