Supplier planning

Chinese New Year 2027 is 6 February. Your last order is due long before that.

The holiday date is fixed. The date that matters to you is not on any calendar: it is the last day your supplier will ship before the factory goes quiet. Count back from that date to find when the order is due, then count forward to find how much it has to carry. The supplier, dates and sales rate in the worked example are invented so the arithmetic can be checked.

Most replenishment runs on a rhythm: an order goes out, it lands, it sells down, the next one goes out. Chinese New Year breaks the rhythm in two places at once. It moves the date the order has to go out, and it stretches the time until the next one can land. The first has a deadline on it, so it gets the attention. The second is the one that empties the shelf in April.

This post works through both with one invented SKU and one invented supplier. Replace each input with your own and the method holds.

The dates you can look up, and the ones you have to ask for

New Year’s Day in 2027 is Saturday 6 February, and the festival runs to the Lantern Festival on Saturday 20 February. Those come from the lunar calendar and do not move.

The official public holiday is different. China’s State Council publishes it each year, and for 2027 it had not been published when this was written (10 October 2026). The 2026 schedule came out on 4 November 2025 and set the Spring Festival holiday at nine days, 15 to 23 February 2026. Expect the 2027 schedule on a similar timetable, and do not plan to an official holiday you have not seen yet.

Even the official holiday is not the date that governs your order, because factories do not run at full output right up to it. Maersk’s guidance for the 2026 holiday said factories “typically reduce output 2–3 weeks before the holiday and may not resume full capacity until mid-March”, with the holiday itself in mid-February that year. It also said workforce availability “recovers slowly” after the break.

That is a general description. Your supplier has specific answers, and they are the ones to plan on. Ask for three dates, in writing:

1. The last day they will ship your goods before the holiday. Not the day the holiday starts. The day the goods leave.
2. The last day they will accept an order and still make that ship date. This is their production time plus whatever queue they are already carrying.
3. When the first post-holiday order will ship, for an order placed now or on the day they reopen. Ask this one in days, not as “back to normal soon”.

The third question is the easy one to skip, and it decides how big the pre-holiday order has to be.

Calculation 1 — when the last order is due

Start from the supplier’s last ship date and count backwards through every step between you deciding to order and the factory starting work.

The invented supplier in this example has told us:

• Last pre-holiday ship date: Friday 22 January 2027 (two weeks before New Year’s Day).
• Normal production time: 35 days from deposit received.
• Reopening: Monday 22 February 2027.

And from our own records:

• Approval and deposit, from deciding to order to the supplier holding the deposit: 5 days. That number comes from your own purchase order history, not from anyone’s quote; the way to measure it is in the post on purchase order approvals.
• A queue buffer of 10 days, because every one of the supplier’s other customers is trying to hit the same ship date. Maersk’s note that orders placed in this window “are often delayed” is the reason to have one. The size is a judgement; it is your margin, not a published figure.

The order has to be decided on by Thursday 3 December 2026: 50 days before the last ship date, and 65 days before New Year’s Day. If the supplier gives an earlier ship date, every row moves with it.

This example counts calendar days. Use the same day basis your supplier actually quotes, calendar or working days, and convert before doing the subtraction.

The holiday is in February. For this supplier, the decision is due in the first week of December.

Calculation 2 — how much the last order has to carry

This is the part that causes the stockout. In a normal month, the next order lands about a cycle after this one. Around Chinese New Year, the next order cannot start until the factory reopens, and when it does it starts behind everyone else’s.

So follow both orders through to the day the stock can be sold. The example uses 30 days from ship date to arrival and 10 days from arrival to sellable. Both are invented here, and both should come from your own receipts for this supplier and this lane; winter crossings and the pre-holiday rush can run slower than your yearly average, which is a reason to look at last winter’s receipts separately. The method for that is in the post on what supplier lead time covers.

From 3 March to 22 May is 80 days. The order that becomes sellable on 3 March is the only new stock that arrives in that window, so it has to cover all 80 days.

The quantity is then:

units to order = (sales rate during the gap × gap days) + safety stock − units you expect to still have on 3 March

At 20 units a day, 80 days is 1,600 units before safety stock. If this SKU is normally reordered every 30 days, a normal order is about 600 units. The pre-holiday order is not a normal order placed early. It is closer to three of them.

Two inputs in that formula deserve a second look:

• The sales rate is the rate during the gap, March to May, not the rate in December when you are placing the order. If last spring sold slower or faster than this winter, use the spring figure. Planning around a promotion uses the same idea: forecast the window you are covering, not the one you are standing in.
• Safety stock needs recalculating, not scaling. The longer shutdown window can increase the uncertainty you need to protect against, but do not mechanically scale safety stock with the 80-day gap. Recalculate it using the lead-time and demand assumptions in your safety-stock method; the calculation is in the safety stock post.

What moves the answer, and by how much

Every input above is an estimate. Before committing, change the ones you are least sure of and see which way the order moves:

Read the columns separately. An earlier last ship date moves both the due date and the quantity, because your stock lands earlier and has further to go. A slower restart moves only the quantity: it does nothing to when you have to order, and everything to how long that order has to last. That is why the third question matters just as much as the first.

Freight time works differently again. If transit on both legs slows by the same amount, the sellable-to-sellable gap stays the same, but your existing stock must last longer before the pre-holiday order arrives. If the two legs slow by different amounts, the gap changes too. Check that before assuming the gap is the only risk.

Two ways to shorten the gap

Place the first post-holiday order before the holiday. Ask the supplier whether an order placed and deposited in January would start on reopening day rather than joining the queue after it. If it would, the second column above starts earlier and the gap shrinks. Whether that is possible depends on the supplier’s materials and terms, so ask rather than assume.

Split the pre-holiday quantity. If 1,600 units arriving at once is a cash or space problem, part of it can ship earlier. Space matters most if the stock goes straight into a marketplace warehouse: a large early delivery sits under warehouse capacity limits and storage fees while it waits to sell. If it lands somewhere else first, the trade-off is covered in the post on splitting stock between a marketplace warehouse and a 3PL.

Neither one removes the arithmetic. They change the inputs. Re-run both calculations with the new dates.

A checklist for the next two weeks

1. List the SKUs made in China, by supplier. One supplier, one set of dates.
2. Send each supplier the three questions above and get the answers in writing.
3. Pull last winter’s receipts for each supplier, so the freight and sellable times are this lane in this season, not a yearly average.
4. Run both calculations per SKU. Write down the due date and the quantity, and the date you will check them again.
5. Watch for the State Council’s 2027 holiday schedule and re-check any supplier date that was given before it came out.