LeadTime
Order date validator for food distributors
March 2026
I work at a food distributor. Every day, customers place orders mixing regular items with items that need preparation time. Fresh bread needs up to 48 hours, prepared vegetables need 24. When a customer requests delivery on a date that doesn't account for this, someone has to catch it, split the order, create a new one for the correct date, and call the customer. The customer gets an order confirmation, then a correction. That's a false promise followed by a fix. And every fix is manual.
Customer service catches what the system doesn't. That's not a workflow, it's a trickle-down from IT. More manual steps means more errors, more corrections, more calls. Any fix that keeps a human in the loop is a bandaid. It works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't, the customer feels it.
LeadTime removes the loop. Enter an order date, a requested delivery date, and the items. It shows which items can't make the date, what the earliest delivery is for each, and how to split. The date engine handles the real constraints: Sundays are never delivery days, public holidays are skipped, per-category cutoff times determine when an order rolls to the next day, and priority customers can bypass certain lead times. It sounds like simple date math. It isn't. That gap between "sounds simple" and "isn't" is where every manual error lives.
Bulk Validation
For operations teams processing hundreds of orders daily, a single-item form doesn't scale. LeadTime accepts CSV uploads - an entire day's order sheet validated in one pass, with exportable results.
Architecture
All validation logic runs client-side. No database, no API dependency. The computation is deterministic and there's no shared state, so a server would add complexity without adding capability. The date engine is pure functions with full test coverage.
What it doesn't do
LeadTime handles single-warehouse, single-supplier lead times. It doesn't route across warehouses, manage supplier-specific preparation windows, or handle international date/holiday conventions. These are real problems in larger distribution operations, but they require integration with inventory and supplier systems that a standalone tool can't provide.