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Lindsay658 (talk | contribs) Lead time |
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(I'm not sure if the "early finish" and "late start" boxes were this or the other way round.)
-- [[User:Smjg|Smjg]] 16:14, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
== Lead time ==
I always thought that one of the major, long-term contributions of PERT for those estimating completion times for complex tasks involving the interaction of many different tasks of many different types from many different sources was the concept of '''lead time'''.
The Wiki-article [[Lead time]] makes no mention of PERT as the term's point of origin.
Also, it seems very puzzling to me that most are speaking of ''lead time'' as if it means "the time taken to produce some manufactured article"; where, according to how I always understood its meaning, application, and implication was that the "lead time" for a particular event was the amount of time ''before a specific point in time'' that one would have to commence the activities that would generate the event in question '''by''' that designated "point in time".
Thus, the "lead time" means something very significant, and something rather like "the time one commence activity in advance of an event in order for the event to occur at X point in time".
Therefore, it does not (and can not) mean what seems to to be an identical, polar-opposite meaning -- which is very different, entirely wrong, utterly misrepresenting, and totally bereft of the wonderful utility of the term's correct application -- that we see in much of the usages: i.e., something like "the earliest time in the future that an event can occur if we start now" (rather than the correct version, "the latest we can start work, so that we will have the product in our hands on date '''D''' at time '''T''').
I feel that there should be:
:(a) some significant piece about "lead time" in the PERT article; and
:(b) once that is settled, appropriate changes also made to the [[Lead time]] article.
Although I may have my wires crossed, I have always thought that "lead time" was the amount of time that had to "lead" or come before the event (and that this was why it was used in the planning and setting up events and processes so that they would finish by a particular date, such as the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games); rather than it being the amount of time beyond this moment that we could expect a finished product to turn up. Can anyone clarify this for me? [[User:Lindsay658|Lindsay658]] 04:22, 17 July 2006 (UTC)
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