Chinese New Year Supply Chain Planning: How to Manage Supply Disruptions Without Spreadsheets

Every year, in preparation for Chinese New Year, supply planners face the same challenges months in advance—how to keep inventory flowing when a significant portion of global manufacturing shuts down.

According to the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics, factories in China typically halt operations for at least 7-10 days during Chinese New Year, with many extending closures to 2-3 weeks. Lead times stretch as factories ramp back up and freight congestion builds.

This is the most predictable disruption in global supply chains. Planners know the dates months in advance. They know which suppliers will be affected. They know the lead times will extend.

Yet managing Chinese New Year and similar predictable events still takes significant planning time and creates downstream coordination challenges.

When speaking with TransImpact customers, they face many types of disruptions:

• Port congestion windows during peak shipping seasons
• Planned supplier facility or factory maintenance shutdowns
• Supplier system transitions (new software)
• Weather events

The challenge isn’t awareness; it is execution.

The Manual Reality

When a disruption like Chinese New Year approaches, planning teams typically:

• Create spreadsheets tracking affected suppliers, adjusted order dates, and financial impact
• Calculate extended lead times SKU by SKU
• Email coordination across demand planning, supply planning, and purchasing
• Manually override order timing in the planning system or ERP
• Explain to Finance why Q4 inventory is elevated
• Repeat the entire process next cycle
  

What you may hear:

“We are heavily relying on Excel for supplemental information and decision making." - Inventory Planning Analyst, Retail

"It's sort of like a snowball effect, right? If you don't have your product shipped out before they go on break, once they get back, there could be extended delays." - Global Planning Manager, Manufacturing

"It's easy to overbuy because the horizon extends to much longer period. So there's a greater opportunity to either underestimate, underbuy and overestimate. And those mistakes are costly." - Sr. Purchasing Manager, Retail

On a small scale, a single disruption is manageable with spreadsheets and institutional knowledge. At a larger scale, multiple suppliers across regions and SKUs with varying lead times can create problems:

• Inconsistent assumptions across planners: One team pulls orders forward 3 weeks, another pulls them forward 5 weeks
• Missed SKUs: Human error means some items slip through without adjustment
• Lost context: When the planner who "always remembers" changes roles, institutional knowledge walks out the door
• Coordination overhead: Repeated meetings to explain why orders, inventory, and forecasts do not align
• Recurring effort: The same disruption requires manual recalculation every planning cycle

The real cost: It is not the disruption itself. It is the organizational friction of handling it inconsistently, manually, and repeatedly.

Introducing Disruption Planning

TransImpact's Disruption Planning brings disruption events directly into Supply Planning. Instead of working around disruptions with spreadsheets and manual workarounds, disruptions become part of the automated order plan calculation. Planners create a disruption event in the system with a simple workflow. Then, the automation gets to work:

• Orders that would normally be placed during the disruption window are adjusted
• Lead times extend based on the disruption parameters
• Inventory projections reflect the timing changes
• All affected SKUs are updated consistently

• Time savings: Hours spent manually calculating disruption impacts and coordinating across teams are redirected to higher-value exception management.
• Stakeholder alignment: When disruption assumptions live in the planning system rather than individual spreadsheets, Finance understands inventory variances, Purchasing sees context for early orders, and demand planning aligns with realistic supply timing.
• Knowledge preservation: Disruption logic persists in the system regardless of team changes. Next year's Chinese New Year planning starts from documented assumptions, not from scratch.

TransImpact's Disruption Planning embeds your knowledge of disruptions directly into your supply plan, so order timing adjusts automatically while keeping teams aligned and service levels protected.

Learn more about Supply Planning or request a demo.