My Supplier Has Different Lead Times for Wax, Fragrance, Wicks and Jars — Should Each Raw Material Have a Separate Reorder Point?

Yes — one reorder point per material, and one per oil

A reorder point answers one question: how low can this material's stock fall before I must place an order so that the new stock arrives before the old runs out? The answer is usage during the lead time plus a safety stock. Because both halves of that sum depend on the lead time, a material that takes twelve days to arrive needs a reorder point three times higher, in days of stock, than one that takes four. Using a single trigger for everything means either the slow material runs out or the fast material sits on the shelf for no reason.

So every material gets its own reorder point, in the unit you actually count it in: kilos of wax, grams of each oil, wicks, jars and sticker sheets. Fragrance oils get one each, because each oil serves a different SKU at a different rate — Jasmine in this example sells three times as fast as Fallen Leaves. Shared materials (the wax, the jar, the wick, the stickers) get one each, sized on the whole line. In the example below that produces nine reorder points for a five-SKU range. That sounds like a lot until you see that most of them collapse into a simple physical rule — "reorder wax when fewer than 3 full bags remain" — that nobody has to calculate on the day.

A note on whose lead times these are. CSI does not publish lead times or delivery times. The figures on this page — wax 4 days usual and 7 worst, oils 7 and 12, wicks 5 and 8, jars 12 and 20 — are the reader's labelled examples, as if from their own records. Yours will differ by product, route, season and whether an item ships with the rest of the order. Measure them from your own order and arrival dates: the usual figure is your typical gap, the worst is the slowest you have actually had.

The nine reorder points for a five-SKU line

The example business sells 300 candles a month across five SKUs, each a 180 g pour in CSI's 200 ml Salsa jar. That 180 g is the reader's own weighed fill: CSI does not publish a fill weight for this jar, and 200 ml is its brim volume, not a wax weight — weigh a test pour of your own. At an 8% load each candle takes 14.4 g of oil and 165.6 g of wax. The safety stock uses the same max-minus-average idea as the shared-wax-versus-slow-oil post: (peak daily use × worst lead time) − (average daily use × usual lead time), with the peak month taken as 20% above forecast — an example figure.

Three patterns are worth seeing. First, the wax has the biggest reorder point in kilos (13.91 kg) but the smallest in days (8.4), because it arrives quickest. Second, the jars have the largest reorder point in days (24.0) — almost a month — because their lead time is long and its worst case is longer. Third, every oil has the same reorder point in days (14.4) because they share a lead time, but very different points in grams, from 622 g of Jasmine down to 207 g of Fallen Leaves. That is the case for one reorder point per oil: a single "reorder oils at 300 g" rule would leave Jasmine short and Fallen Leaves over-stocked.

What goes wrong with a single trigger

Suppose all four materials were bought together for the month and you reorder everything on the day the wax reaches its reorder point. At that moment every material has 8.4 days of stock left. The wax and the stickers are fine. The oils are fine on a usual delivery but, on a worst-case 12-day delivery, run out 3.6 days early. The jars run out 3.6 days before a usual delivery arrives — 36 candles that cannot be poured — and 11.6 days before a worst-case one, 116 candles. The wax you so carefully protected sits in the bag with nothing to pour it into.

The opposite fix is just as costly in a different currency. Reorder everything on the jars' trigger instead and nothing runs out — but the wax order goes out 15.6 days earlier than it needs to, every month. That is about 25.83 kg of Chunks, roughly ₹15,474.33, sitting on your shelf permanently for no protection it was not already getting. Multiply that by every fast-arriving material and a single early trigger quietly becomes the largest block of idle cash in the workshop. Reducing the cash locked in raw materials is the follow-on to this.

If you want one consolidated order anyway

Many small makers prefer one order a month from one supplier: fewer deliveries, one invoice, one unpacking day. That is a perfectly good policy — but it does not remove per-material numbers. It changes them from reorder points into order-up-to levels. With a fixed review every 30 days, each material's target is usage over (review period + its own lead time) plus its own safety stock; the order is that target minus what you have. The long-lead jars still get the bigger target; the quick wax still gets the smaller one.

Notice the jar target: well over a month of jars, because a jar ordered at this month's review must last until next month's order arrives, twelve to twenty days later. If that feels like too much glass on the shelf, the honest options are to review jars more often than the rest, or to shorten the jar lead time — not to pretend it is the same as the wax's. Placing one monthly order across every SKU builds the consolidated order line by line, and the three-wick-size post applies per-item reorder points to several wick sizes at once.

This month's priced order, with the allowance stack

The reorder points decide when; this table decides how much. The order covers one month of 300 candles with the allowance stack applied in the series' fixed order: no test candles (every material is already approved), a 2% reject allowance on consumables (divide by 0.98), 3% pour loss on wax and oil only, 1% breakage on glass only, then rounding up to real in-stock packs. All the percentages are labelled working assumptions — use your own records. Planning for 2% jar breakage covers the glass line in more depth.

That is ₹61,337.62 of CSI materials, ₹204.46 per planned candle before labour, packaging, freight and GST. Two pack details matter. The Chunks line is bought as 10 × 5 kg + 3 × 1 kg, because two 5 kg bags (₹5,990.00) are ₹9.00 cheaper than one 10 kg bag (₹5,999.00). The 500 g bag is a rupee a kilo cheaper again (₹598.00), but 105 small bags for ₹31,395.00 is not a sensible way to run a 300-candle month. The Salsa jar is the one material in this list with a real bulk break: ₹40.12 each in a pack of 5, ₹29.50 in a 50 or 100 carton.

Keeping nine reorder points alive

Reorder points go stale in two ways: demand changes, or lead times change. Recompute every point when monthly volume moves by more than you are comfortable with (many makers use a labelled threshold such as 10–15%), when a delivery is slower than your recorded worst, and before any season you know is different — Diwali and the November–February wedding season are the obvious ones. Growing 20% a month shows how to raise points step by step without over-buying.

Keep a simple log beside each shelf rule: order date, arrival date, quantity. After three or four orders you have your own usual and worst lead time for that material, and the example figures on this page can be replaced. If a material's arrivals become erratic, raise its worst-case input rather than ordering everything early; that keeps the extra cover where the risk is.

This page belongs to the procurement cluster that starts with converting a formula into a 30-day purchase order and converting monthly sales into material requirements. Forecasting 500 candles a month per SKU supplies the per-oil usage this page needs, the line-stopping materials post decides which points deserve worst-case inputs, and the capstone, the full procurement system, shows where reorder points sit between safety stock and pack selection.

Frequently asked questions