DHL is the most under-discussed thing on this board
Thinking out loud about this: DHL is the most under-discussed thing on this board.
The regional stock question, and why it is the first thing I ask now.
If a supplier holds the line you want in a warehouse in your own region, your order is a domestic shipment. No international leg, no clearance, a shorter cold exposure and a lead time in days rather than weeks. If they do not, it is an international shipment however it is described at checkout.
So the question is not "how fast do you ship" but "which lines do you hold in regional stock, and is the one I want among them". It is one email, the answer is usually a list, and it changes what to order and when — especially in summer.
A lane is an origin, a destination, a carrier and a season. Change any one and the distribution changes, which is why supplier-level shipping averages are close to meaningless.
Total transit decomposes into first mile, international leg, clearance and last mile. Only the first two are meaningfully under the shipper’s control and most reported variance sits in the last two.
Research-use-only material is not approved for human use and nothing here should be read as a recommendation to use it.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Median transit is the useful statistic. The minimum is a story about one shipment and the mean is dragged around by a single hold.
ask which lines are actually held in the regional warehouse
customs clearance time is not carrier time and they get conflated
customs clearance time is not carrier time and they get conflated
Adding the field everyone forgets — the month. Without it the report is not comparable to anything.
A quoted lead time is a commitment you can evaluate. Measuring quoted against actual across several orders tells you more about an operation than the raw speed does.
rigid outer packaging is the cheapest quality signal there is
Adding the field everyone forgets — the month.
Disagreeing with this bit: a single slow shipment does not move a lane, it joins the distribution.
What was the packaging like on arrival?
Disagreeing with this bit: a single slow shipment does not move a lane, it joins the distribution.
This is why the lane table is organised the way it is. The supplier is not the unit.
Cosigning the seasonality point. February and August on the same lane are different animals.
Clearance took three days and the carrier took nine. I had been blaming the wrong half for two years.
That is a packaging observation, not a transit observation. Worth posting, worth separating.
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reship policy in writing before you order
the median is more useful than the fastest anybody ever got
two identical orders a week apart is the cheapest experiment available
the last mile is where most of the variance lives
Right, and the last mile is where my variance has always come from, not the international leg.
Left up and added to the lane table. All four required fields were present, which is rarer than it should be.
Not convinced by four data points. That is not a lane yet, it is an anecdote with a route attached.
Agreed on rigid packaging. It costs the shipper almost nothing and it predicts a lot about the rest of the operation.
Not convinced by four data points.
hedda_adeyemi is right about regional stock. It changes the shape of the distribution, not just the mean.
Packaging is assessable on arrival with no equipment: rigid outer, no movement inside, the cold element sized to the transit rather than to the box.
Same. TFC quoted 6 days on my lane and it landed at 14, which is exactly what you want from a quote.
Correction: that was clearance time, not carrier time. The lane table separates them for exactly this reason.
Correction: that was clearance time, not carrier time.
Agreed — and the decomposition matters. Most people are blaming the international leg for a last-mile problem.
Small fix — shipped from the regional warehouse, not from origin, which is why the number looks unusual.
Push back: comparing a July transit with a February one on the same lane is not a comparison.
That is the quoted lead time, not the observed transit. Both belong in the report and they are different columns.
regional stock changes everything about transit
- 1customs clearance time is not carrier time and they get conflated16 comments in this branch · started by u/farid_jansen
- 2Same. TFC quoted 6 days on my lane and it landed at 14, which is exactly…7 comments in this branch · started by u/annika_fonseca