A standard lead time calculator based on optimization technique

In a highly-regulated service market, companies are often required to provide equivalent service offerings to their customers. In the context of service delivery, standard lead times are often adopted by the businesses as committable, uniform timescale for fulfilling their services. Existing practice of calculating standard lead times are manual and often erroneous; regardless of the variances of demand and resource across geographical areas and time horizon, service enterprises are confined to single, universal standard lead times. Ill-defined standard lead times have two consequences: if it is too long, it would make service enterprises uncompetitive and drive customers away; if it is too short, it could incur huge compensation bills for delayed or failed services. In order to tackle this problem, we developed a service lead time calculator to work out standard lead time based on projected resource and demand. Some optimization techniques have been devised to work out the best alignment between resource and demand. A case study in a utility service company was carried out to demonstrate the value of this approach.