I recently moved and it was time to get a new sofa. I have not shopped for a sofa in 15-some years and it was quite the surprise to my get things in two days mindset.
To be fair I never thought I would get one in two days but was shocked to find that the vast majority of orders took two months to arrive.
Some few were kept in stock and could arrive within a week but unless you wanted that exact one you have to wait. This is not quite a “custom order”. The merchant has a sample on display with optional colors/fabrics you can choose. A true “custom” order is selecting a color/fabric which is not on offer.
I guess my issue is we here that GM can make a car every several minutes so why does it take eight weeks to make a sofa? I will grant that GM is bigger than sofa makers but eight weeks for a sofa?
I would think with modern manufacturing and processes they could get one together in a week or two. I pushed the sales person on the time and they were adamant…eight weeks, they aren’t kidding and it will not come sooner.
GM doesn’t make a car in minutes, they take days. Sofa production lines tend to be less streamlined than those for cars, often needing to retool between each two sofas: that alone multiplies production times.
A way to lower time between orders and shipment would be to have some sofa frames in the warehouse, so only the parts which are different for each customer would have to be made to order. But alas! Stock is passive! Aaaaaaah! No! Must not have passive! I’m not even sure I’m exaggerating, given the way some economists and associated trades react when they hear the word “passive”.
A lot of current industrial practices are directed specifically to lowering stocks as much as possible, and this includes finished product, half-made product and raw materials. It is perfectly possible that those long production times for sofas do not just include the time to make and ship the sofa, but also the time for the sofamaker to order some of the parts they obtain from some other company - such as the ready-to-finish sofa covers (a friend of mine works in a factory that makes the covers for bus seats - just the cloth covers - but bus seats aren’t ordered as one-shots whereas sofa covers might).
GM sold 10 million cars in one year. Presumably they built 10 million cars in that year. Perhaps they had cars on hand for that but still…gives you an idea of their production capacity.
You’re counting as if each car was the only one being built at the time. Each individual car is built at the same time as many others. A single line (much less a single factory, or all the factories making GM cars and preassemblies) is not fully occupied by one car.
I can make 20 individual flans in 20 minutes. But that’s not because I make a flan in one minute: it’s because I make 20 flans at the same time. Making a single flan still takes 20 minutes.
I would think the demand should be definitely lower, after all, a sofa could last decades whereas a car is lucky to last a decade. In addition, there aren’t very many no-car families that have sofas whereas there are plenty of several-car families that only have one sofa.
It occurs to to me that the sofa factory might be busy right now making sofas that were ordered six weeks ago. When those are done, they’ll start working on the sofas that were ordered five weeks ago, etc. In six weeks, they’ll start building yours, and you’ll have it in eight. Two weeks to build a sofa doesn’t strike me as being particularly out of line.
GM cannot make a car every several minutes, they can ***complete ***a car every several minutes. If you custom-order a car, will you be able to drive away in it a few minutes later?
It doesn’t take eight weeks to make a sofa, rather it takes that long to process the order.
We don’t typically wait several weeks for a car because dealers carry sufficient inventory to allow for a range of choices. My guess would be that high-end furniture manufacturers offer too much variance to make that sort of inventory practice feasible. Some furniture stores offer this range of inventory as well, but they tend to be down-market, and they do so by constraining the variety available.
Where I work at times we could have twice the staff. Also a lot of times we can push a job to go faster than normal, but there is always a cost. Mistakes, things missed, bad communication all become more likely in a rush job and other jobs may get neglected. Sometime those negatives can wipe out any profit or end up costing us money. If things are slow too much staff / idle resources quickly eats away at income from good times. Several local companies in our field went under in the past year, but we have been stable, getting the job done for twenty years. We find a balance where we can keep a group of well trained staff, enough for both the busy times and the slow times, and get jobs done sustainably.
I think the guys making the sofa are doing the same thing.
I think it’s about managing inventory and only making what you know you can sell. Having a warehouse full of finished sofas that nobody wants doesn’t do you any good. While they can project demand to a certain extent, it seems to be more a build to order situation than other mass produced goods. So you build some and send them out to showrooms and then wait for the orders to come in. You pre order parts and start building based on anticipated demand, and if it take 2 months to ship out a sofa that’s okay. It’s not that time sensitive for most people. If the sofa has to made in China and shipped the the US that adds a month right there.
You said you haven’t shopped for a sofa in 15 years. How many cars has your family bought during that time? How many people do you know whose sofa is newer than their car?
Does your family have as many sofas as cars? Do all your friends?
Many teenagers have their own cars. How many teenagers have their own sofa?
Also, there are only 3 American car companies, plus a handful of companies that export cars to the US. There are 41 American furniture companies listed on Wikipedia, and I bet there are many more that aren’t listed.
And I bet there was a LOT more varieties of sofas available at any given furniture store than the number of car models sold at any car dealer.
In addition to the Just-In-Time inventory control, they may be hoping for several orders of the same type to improve their efficiency. After tooling is set up for one, it’s much easier to build extras of the same model. You don’t have that flexibility if you promise a 2-week delivery time.
And of course, they have to account for fluctuations in demand. What if your factory can make 100 sofas a week, but one of your dealers has a huge holiday sale and manage to sell 300 in a weekend? You’re in deep trouble if you’d advertised a 1-week delivery time.
Whenever I’ve purchased a sofa it has always been in stock at the retailers warehouse. The last two purchases I can remember were from Rooms To Go and Havertys. Am I the only one who doesn’t have custom furniture made? Is it common to have something like a sofa custom ordered?
Yep, and I’ve always bought what the stores had in stock. I never bought furniture new that I couldn’t pick up at the warehouse that same weekend. So it is possible, if you aren’t too picky, to avoid the wait. Of course, I don’t buy new furniture often, usually I’m okay with used.
It baffled me when my girlfriend worked at a furniture store and explained how her customers had to wait six to eight weeks from the date of purchase to receive their furniture. Apparently, returns (or warehouse stockers’ mistakes) from sales she made months ago could wipe out her monthly quotas and eliminate her commissions. It was a messed up system for customers and salespeople alike, in my opinion.
The furniture manufacturer might roll a new sofa out of the factory every several minutes. (It probably takes a couple of days to make a single car, and the reason it is so fast is that they have enormous capacity because of the large scale and relative predictability of the business.) It just takes eight weeks to make any single sofa, and the clock starts ticking when you submit your order.
It may take two or three weeks before they even start making your sofa. To be cost-effective, they want to keep resources at a level where they are not idle. If they beefed up to the point where they could get you your sofa in a week, there would be times where they are sitting around doing nothing waiting for the next order. They have to balance that against having enough resources so that their throughput is good enough that they don’t lose business because of it. Did you shop around for who could deliver your sofa fastest, or did you go with the sofa that you liked the best?
obbn: I would guess that people have custom sofas made either to have a a tremendous selection of fabrics or because the want to buy a set with matching chairs/other furniture.
fulminating old wiseacre : “Bought ? Bought ? Nay lad, thee must build anything you want from the ground up; only then will you fully grasp it’s mystery. Be self-reliant ! Don’t take that shop-bought gimcrack stuff; build your own house, weave your own clothes, grow your own food, dig your own oil. And at the end of the day, you can say satisfiedly: ‘* I made that.*’”
