Chinese New Year 2027: change a supplier lead time in Restock Ops

Chinese New Year 2027 falls on Saturday 6 February, eleven days earlier than it did in 2026. For anyone who buys from factories in China, Vietnam or Taiwan the date itself is not the problem. The problem is the six weeks around it: lines slow down in the second half of January as workers travel home, the official holiday closes everything for about a week, and output does not return to normal until late February because not everyone comes back. A supplier who ships in 30 days the rest of the year ships in 60 or 70 across that window, and a reorder report that still believes in 30 days will tell you to order two weeks after you should have.

The fix in Restock Ops is one field: the supplier's lead time. This post is about what happens when you change it, because the number is used in more places than the reorder report and it is worth knowing which of them move and which stay put. The short version: the report recalculates immediately for every item that supplier covers, new purchase orders pick up the new expected date, and purchase orders you already created keep the date they had.

Where the lead time lives and who reads it

Lead time is a property of the supplier, not of the product. You set it once on the supplier's page, in the Lead time (days) field, and every reorder rule that points at that supplier uses it. The supplier setup post covers the rest of the form. The suppliers list shows the current value in its Lead time column, so a quick scan tells you which suppliers still carry a summer number in January.

Three parts of the app read it. The reorder report reads it every time the page loads, straight from the supplier record, so there is no cached copy to refresh. Purchase order creation reads it once, at the moment a PO is created, to fill in the expected delivery date. And each row on the reorder report shows it as a small label, for example 30d lead, so you can see which lead time a suggestion was built on without opening the supplier.

What the reorder report does with it

The report works out, for each item with a rule, how many units you should hold to cover the time until a new order can arrive. The position is what you have on hand plus what is already incoming on open purchase orders. The target is the item's daily sales velocity multiplied by the lead time plus the days of cover you asked for in the rule, rounded up. An item is flagged as running out when its position is below the target and the days its position will last are no more than lead time plus cover. The reorder point versus days of cover post goes through the two rule styles; the lead time matters to both.

Because lead time sits inside that multiplication, doubling it does not nudge the target, it roughly doubles the lead time share of it. Take a product selling 4 units a day with a supplier at 30 days and a rule asking for 14 days of cover. The target is 4 times 44, which is 176 units. Change the supplier to 60 days for the holiday and the target becomes 4 times 74, which is 296. An item sitting at 200 units on hand and incoming was comfortably above the line a moment ago. Now it is 96 short, its 50 days of stock no longer reach the 74 days until a replacement could land, and it appears on the report as running out. That is the correct answer: ordered today it arrives in late December with a 60 day lead, and if you had waited for the 30 day arithmetic to flag it you would have ordered in mid December for a February arrival that the factory will not make.

The change applies to every item that supplier covers at once, which is the point of keeping it on the supplier. A store with 80 SKUs from one factory edits one field and reads the result, rather than touching 80 rules. Minimum order quantities and case sizes still round the suggested quantity after the target is worked out, so the suggested order respects them exactly as before.

What happens to the expected dates on purchase orders

When you create a purchase order for a supplier, the app sets the Expected delivery field to the creation date plus the supplier's lead time, or leaves it blank if the supplier has no lead time. That is a starting value, not a live one. The header field stays editable until the PO is closed or cancelled, and the app never recalculates it afterwards, so a change to the supplier's lead time has no effect on purchase orders that already exist. This is deliberate: the date on an open PO is a promise about that shipment, and a supplier telling you their general lead time is now 60 days does not change what they said about the container already on the water.

In practice that gives you a two step job around the holiday. Update the supplier's lead time first, so every PO created from now on carries a realistic date and the reorder report flags items early. Then open the POs that are already placed and will be affected, and edit their expected dates by hand, using whatever the supplier actually told you about each one. The purchase order fields reference describes the field and its states. The Receive page sorts open orders by expected date, so a PO you forget to move will sit near the top looking late while one you did move drops into its real slot.

A calendar for suppliers in China

Dates vary by factory and region, and the official public holiday schedule is published by the State Council late in the preceding year, so treat these as planning estimates and ask each supplier for their own. New Year's Day is 6 February 2027. Most factories stop taking new orders for pre-holiday production around mid January, because anything not finished by the last week of January will not ship before the break. Workers begin leaving in the last ten days of January. The official holiday runs about a week from the eve of New Year, and in recent years factories have reopened in stages over the following two to three weeks, with full output around the end of February. Freight adds its own delay: ports are congested in the two weeks before the holiday and sailings thin out during it.

Translated into lead times: a supplier who normally quotes 30 days is realistically 60 to 75 days for anything ordered from mid December to mid February. The honest approach is to raise the lead time in Restock Ops at the start of December, order what the report tells you to in the first half of December, and bring the lead time back down in March once the first post-holiday shipments confirm the factory is at speed. If you raise it later than early December the report will flag items you can no longer order in time, which is still useful information, but the quantity suggested will be larger and the expected dates later.

Step by step

• Open Suppliers and scan the Lead time column for every factory that closes for the holiday. Note the current value so you can restore it in March.
• Open each affected supplier and set Lead time (days) to the holiday figure, 60 to 75 for a normal 30 day supplier. Save.
• Open the Reorder report. Items that moved to running out are the ones the change surfaced; read the Nd lead label to confirm the row used the new number. Create draft purchase orders from the report for the ones you want to cover.
• Open any purchase order already placed with that supplier and edit the expected delivery date to what the supplier has confirmed for that shipment. The app will not do this for you.
• Put a reminder in March to set the lead times back. A supplier left at 70 days all year makes the report order too much, too early, which is the mirror image of the holiday problem.

What the change does not do

It does not alter days of cover, minimum order quantities, case sizes, cost history or anything about the products. It does not touch inventory in Shopify; the reorder report is a suggestion and only a received purchase order writes stock. It does not change the velocity, which is still read from recent sales, so a product whose sales are also seasonal needs its cover days looked at separately; the holiday ordering post deals with that side. And it does not keep a history of lead time values, which is why the first step above says to write the old number down.

One more thing it does not do: it does not know which of your suppliers are in China. The field is a plain number and the app applies the same arithmetic to a supplier in Ohio with a two day lead. That is the right design for a tool used in every country, but it means the calendar above is your job, once a year, with one field per supplier.

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