Lead-time intelligence · EU & US manufacturing
Capital markets re-price a geopolitical event in seconds. Your ERP re-prices it never. We read the world's records — filings, customs manifests, tenders, port notices, permits, rate decisions — and correct the one field every planning system gets wrong: planned delivery time.
Read by 100+ operators at manufacturers, funds and suppliers.
The problem
Public companies file. Your tier-3 supplier does not. Commodities — magnesium, gallium, rare earths, freight, power — are priced every day and never once linked to the component they end up inside. So the trigger arrives as a rumour, three weeks late, through a supplier who is also guessing.
$2.5tn
Of AI, defense and space capex sitting somewhere in supply chains that appear in no public record.
8 in 10
Suppliers we surveyed say a lead time slipped because an event reached them too late to act on.
Tier 1
Where ERP visibility ends — and where almost none of the disruption actually originates.
Method
We do not replace SAP, Oracle or your planning stack, and we do not train a foundation model. The ontology is the asset — a resolved map of triggers, plants and parts across languages, subsidiaries and shell names.
01 — EXTRACT
The world's records
Earnings calls, filings, tenders, customs records, permits, rate decisions, reservoir and weather data, port and canal notices, energy curtailments. Every quantitative claim carries its provenance.
02 — MAP
Trigger → plant → part
Entity resolution across languages, subsidiaries and plant names, so a licence suspension in one jurisdiction lands on the specific component in your bill of materials.
03 — PREDICT
Who moves, and when
System-dynamics transmission modelling propagates the shock down the chain and returns a corrected lead time with a date, not a risk colour.
04 — SCORE
Confidence on every edge
Each link is scored, so your planner knows which corrections to act on this week and which to watch. No score, no recommendation.
Position
Two axes decide this category: whether a system looks backward or forward, and whether it reads your data or the world's. One quadrant is empty.
The terminal
One screen your commodity manager and S&OP planner open on Monday: what moved, by how much, why, and how sure we are. It reaches your planners through the API, in the ERP field they already look at.
| Component | Lead | Δ | Confidence | Driver |
|---|---|---|---|---|
EUV optics module TIER 3 · NL/DE |
58w | ▲ +6w | 0.91 |
Sub-supplier capex deferral disclosed on Q2 call |
HBM3E stack TIER 2 · KR |
21w | ▲ +3w | 0.87 |
Test capacity reallocated; customs volumes down 14% |
Advanced packaging slot TIER 1 · TW |
17w | ▼ −1w | 0.84 |
New line permit granted, ahead of stated schedule |
Magnesium alloy billet TIER 4 · CN |
11w | ▲ +4w | 0.79 |
Provincial energy curtailment order, 3 smelters affected |
Precision ring forging TIER 3 · IT |
34w | ▲ +2w | 0.72 |
Defense tender award consuming the same press capacity |
ILLUSTRATIVE VIEW · NOT A LIVE FEED
Who it's for
If all four describe you, a 30-minute call is worth your time. If two of them do, read the newsletter for a quarter and see whether we are calling things you already knew.
You buy long-lead capital equipment or critical components
Anything where the gap between order and delivery is measured in quarters, not weeks.
Revenue above €100m
Below that, a single slipped lead time usually isn't worth an intelligence subscription.
You are exposed to a commodity or a chokepoint
A metal, a chemical, a strait, a grid, an export-control regime. Usually more than one.
You already pay for market intelligence
The strategy or CFO office funds it — the same line that funds your commodity research today.
Evidence
Before a signal reaches a customer it has to reproduce disruptions we already know the outcome of — from the public record available on the day, not with hindsight. If the signal doesn't generate, we say so.
2021
Taiwan drought — reservoir levels and water-allocation notices against fab output and downstream wafer lead times.
2021
China magnesium curtailment — provincial energy orders against aluminium alloy availability across European automotive.
2023
Panama Canal restrictions — transit slot auctions and draft limits against landed dates for capital equipment.
Now
AI compute, end to end — hyperscaler to accelerator to foundry to lithography, built with research groups at INSEAD, Glasgow and Arizona.
Two ways in
Most people read first and talk later. Both doors are open.
Door one · free
A monthly read on lead times for critical components — what moved, what caused it, and what it means for the people ordering. No gated PDF, no drip sequence.
Opens the Substack in a new tab. Read past issues →
Door two · pilot
Send us one component you cannot get a straight delivery date on. We build the chain beneath it from public records and walk you through what we find — no ERP access needed for the first conversation.
Or find us on X.