“In stock” in the context of our past “Just in Time” approach to fulfillment meant that we had the particular item on shelves in our fulfillment center and were shipping through them, and would fulfill new orders “just in time” based on the lead time estimate (ideally our standard 10-business day window but with the current supply chain woes, as you know, lead times for some of our products are much longer). Items are listed as “backordered” when we don’t have them on our shelves and the next just-in-time manufacturing run won’t arrive at the fulfillment center within our lead time.
But as the article discusses, and you allude to, relying on Just in Time for fulfillment works until it doesn’t. What we’ve seen, and what’s been so challenging, is that when a link in the chain breaks, it ends up breaking these past estimates and causing delays, without much cushion to absorb that. When you combine that with new orders that keep coming in, it sometimes creates a backlog. When these things have happened we try our best to update our lead times, etc. to account for it, but we can’t go back in the past and update the estimates that are now no longer accurate.
This is the reason for this new approach this article is talking about. Instead of relying on a steady stream of just-in-time manufacturing runs to stay in stock, we are going to start maintaining much more inventory than we need so that we can better absorb any future disruptions. Very soon we will be all caught up on the Librem 14 backlog, at shipping parity, and if it weren’t for the two-week office closure at the end of the year we would have already updated and shortened the Librem 14 lead time to be less than 6 weeks.
By the beginning of the year the Librem 14 stock won’t rely on just in time. We have invested to ensure the rest of the products take the same approach (as supplies permit) but with varying lead times and challenges getting components, but it will take longer for some products to get to that point.