Supply Chain Variability, Translated Into Dollars.
Trilink measures inbound transit-time variability for made-to-stock furniture and durable-goods importers — and shows you exactly what it’s costing you in inventory, cash, and margin. One client recovered $350,000 in first-year savings from smarter inventory planning.
✓We never touch your freight — we make sure it flows ✓If the number’s small, we’ll tell you
Two Ways to Work With Us
HAND IT OFF — Outsourced Supply Chain Management. International importing shouldn’t require you to become an expert in it. Instead of hiring an in-house logistics manager, plug in Trilink as your supply chain department: replenishment planning, shipment flow, delivery scheduling, and document coordination — we compile, chase, and hand off. Your factory books with your forwarder; your licensed broker files your entries. We never touch your freight — we make sure it flows.
MEASURE IT — Diagnostic & Roadmap. Your quoted lead time is a number. Your actual lead times are a distribution — and the gap is silently draining your inventory, cash, and margin. We measure your real lanes from your own shipment records and hand your team a roadmap it can run without us: reorder points, safety stock by SKU, and a control chart that flags when a lane shifts. And if the leak is small, we’ll tell you — that’s the deal.
The Silent Cost That Never Shows Up On An Invoice
It doesn’t appear on any invoice, but it drains your working capital every replenishment cycle.
What You Feel
Stockouts on your best sellers while closeout inventory piles up in the warehouse. Cash locked in “just in case” stock. Containers that show up two weeks early — or three weeks late — against the same quoted transit time.
What’s Actually Causing It
It usually isn’t your demand forecast. In the safety-stock math, lead-time variability typically outweighs demand variability — on one client lane we measured, by a ratio of 22 to 1. That variance silently drains your balance sheet, your income statement, and your cash flow. Most importers have never measured it, because no one in the freight chain is paid to show it to you.
What We Do About It
We measure your actual lanes from your own shipment records — container by container — and translate the variability into dollars: how much inventory it forces you to carry, what that costs to fund, and where the exposure sits by SKU. Then we give you reorder points and safety-stock levels built on your real numbers, not a rule of thumb.
What Makes Our Service Stand Out?
The Walk-Away Promise
If measurement shows your leak is small, we’ll tell you that and shake hands. You’ll know your number either way.
Advisory Only, By Design
We never book freight, never appear on shipping documents, and never take a carrier commission. Our only product is the answer — which means our only incentive is that the answer is right. Whether you use us for a one-time diagnostic or as your outsourced supply chain department, the booking party is never us.
Measurement, Not Opinion
Every number comes from your own shipment history — container-level records, not industry averages or gut feel. If we can’t measure it, we won’t claim it.
Built by Operators
Thirty years in international sourcing, network design, and logistics on one side of the table; a decade selling freight to furniture importers on the other. We’ve sat in your chair and your vendors’ chairs.
Are you doing everything possible to optimize your supply chain?
Common Questions We Address
My planned lead time says 30 days. What is my actual distribution — and what is the gap costing me per replenishment cycle?
My transit times swing by weeks against the same quoted lead time — how do I plan around variability I can’t control?
With 1,250 units of a specific SKU on hand, what is the likelihood of running out of stock before the next shipment arrives?
Given the variability in manufacturing time, ocean freight transit time, discharge, clearance and drayage when should I issue my next purchase order?
How much safety stock should I maintain to meet customer demand without experiencing stockouts?
Why do I have excess inventory of certain items while experiencing shortages of high-demand SKUs?
How can I reduce the amount of inventory that I’m forced to liquidate at significant loss thereby reducing my profitability?
How can I track where I am in the life cycle of my product?
To meet 95% of consumer demand, how many units should I stock? What are the cost implications of holding inventory to meet 95% versus 100% of demand?