Safety time is a key control factor in material procurement and production control. The safety time is used to determine the period of time by which a demand should be covered before its actual demand date; it is therefore used to improve the security of supply. A safety time of three days, for example, means that the material delivery or the production order receives a date as the target delivery date that is three days before the actual requirement.
Our tip:
The safety time is an elegant method of building up a procurement safety stock in procurement in the event of fluctuating delivery times for a material. In contrast to an ongoing physical procurement safety stock, as calculated using the Bower-Sox formula, for example, the application of the safety time only results in a stock if the supplier delivers on time. All in all, this means that you can manage with a lower safety stock on the procurement side.
