Most of what's written about reorder points quietly assumes your supplier is around the corner. You hit the trigger, place the order, and stock shows up in a week or two. For your local suppliers that's true, and a reorder point does its job.
Then there are the SKUs that come from overseas.
I run Personalised Favours, a Sydney-based Cin7 Core manufacturer with a bill-of-materials model and more than 35 suppliers feeding it. A good chunk of those suppliers sit on the other side of an ocean. The blank ceramic mugs we print on, the woven ribbon by the thousand-foot roll, a big slice of the components behind our seasonal range — none of it is made down the road. It's made offshore, packed into a shipping container, floated across the Pacific, cleared through customs, and trucked to the warehouse. Door to door, that's eight to ten weeks on a good run.
A reorder point cannot help you with stock that takes ten weeks to arrive. By the time on-hand drops to your trigger level, the order you place won't land for two months, and you'll sell through everything you have before it does. You don't get a top-up. You get a gap.
So for those SKUs you plan around cover: how many weeks of stock you'll have on the shelf, and how long a refill takes to land.
The two ordering modes nobody separates
Every SKU you buy falls into one of two ordering modes, and the mistake is running both on the same logic.
Replenishment. Short lead time, order often, small quantities. Your local supplier delivers in ten business days. You let stock fall to a reorder point and top it back up. The reorder point math works because the cost of being slightly wrong is small — worst case you place another order next week.
Resupply by sea. Long lead time, order rarely, large quantities. The factory needs three weeks to produce, the container takes five weeks on the water, and customs plus inland freight eats another week or two. You can't order often because each order is a production run with a minimum, and you can't order small because the factory won't make 200 units.
These are different problems. Sizing a sea-freight order with a reorder point is like setting your alarm for the time you need to arrive instead of the time you need to leave. The trigger fires when it's already too late to act on it.
Order to a cover target instead
For a sea-freight SKU, the question isn't "when does stock get low enough to reorder." It's "how many months of cover do I want on the shelf after the next container lands, and when do I have to place the order so it arrives before I run dry."
That's a cover target. You pick a horizon — say six months of stock on hand after each shipment — and you size every order to refill back to it.
The order quantity is the demand you'll burn through during the lead time plus the cover you want left over, minus what you already have and what's already on the water.
Order quantity = daily demand × (lead-time days + cover-target days) − on hand − on order
Run a real SKU through it. A mug that sells 12 units a day. Lead time of 70 calendar days door to door. You want 180 days of cover on the shelf once the container clears.
- Demand across lead time + cover: 12 × (70 + 180) = 3,000 units
- On hand right now: 600 units
- Already on order: 0
Order quantity = 3,000 − 600 = 2,400 units. That's roughly seven months of stock in one purchase order, which feels like a lot until you remember the next window to order is months away and the freight cost per unit drops the fuller the container goes.
The other half of the job is timing. With 70 days of transit, you have to place that order while you still have more than 70 days of cover left, or the shelf hits zero before the ship docks. With 600 units on hand and 12 a day, you've got 50 days of cover. You're already 20 days late. That's the kind of thing a reorder point never warns you about, because it's watching the wrong number.
The trap: on a long-lead SKU your shelf can look healthy while you're already too late. Once your days of cover left drop under your transit time, the next stockout is locked in. There's no order you can place fast enough to stop it.
Three places this quietly goes wrong
Business days versus calendar days. Production lead times get quoted in business days. "Twenty working days to produce" is a month on the calendar once you count weekends and a holiday or two. Your customers, meanwhile, buy seven days a week. If you plug 20 into a formula that's measuring demand in calendar days, you've understated your transit exposure by 40 percent before the container even leaves the port. Convert the production quote to calendar days first, then add the shipping and customs legs.
The lead time you typed in is fiction. When you onboarded that supplier you wrote down whatever they told you. Sixty days, maybe. Then you never looked again. Go pull the last six purchase orders for an overseas supplier in Cin7 Core, subtract the order date from the date it landed in stock, and take the median. I did this across my import suppliers and found one running 19 days longer than the number I'd been planning against for a year. Nineteen days of demand I wasn't covering, on a SKU I'd stocked out on twice and blamed on bad luck.
The exchange rate on the PO. You pay the factory in US dollars. Your books are in your home currency. If the conversion rate on the purchase order is wrong or missing, your landed cost is wrong, and every margin number built on top of it is wrong too. On a 2,400-unit order, a few cents of FX drift per unit is real money you won't notice until the stock is sold.
What this looks like when it's automated
The math isn't hard. Doing it by hand across every imported SKU, every time, on top of the local replenishment you're already managing, is where it falls apart. So the spreadsheet becomes the job, and the job loses to whatever's on fire that day.
This is the gap Stocura sits in, on top of Cin7 Core. International ordering is built around a cover target — you set the months of cover you want and Stocura sizes the order to hit it. Lead times are learned from your own received-PO history rather than the number you guessed at onboarding, so the 70-day SKU is planned as 70 days, not the 60 you wrote down. Lead time is carried in business days where your supplier quotes them, and converted correctly against calendar-day demand. Multi-currency purchase orders come through with the right FX rate already filled in from your Cin7 Core currency settings, so the landed cost is right the first time. When you're ready, the order drafts straight into Cin7 Core as a PO.
You still decide how much cover you want and when to commit the container. The arithmetic underneath just stops being something you have to hold in your head.
What you can do this week
Pull your supplier list and mark every one whose goods arrive by sea. Those are the SKUs a reorder point is failing you on right now. For each, measure the real lead time from your last few received POs rather than trusting the onboarding number. Then decide how many months of cover you want on the shelf after a shipment lands. Now compare that cover against the transit time. Anywhere the transit is longer than the cover you've got left, you have an order you should already have placed.
Ordering by the container shouldn't mean ordering by guesswork.
Stocura sizes every international order to your cover target — with learned lead times and the right FX rate — and drafts it straight into Cin7 Core. Free until August 1, 2026 during soft launch.
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