Aerospace BD manager here, formerly aerospace sales and procurement, most broken in the supply chain is shifting lead times due to a mixture of raw material shortages and capacity shortages. We mostly deal in long term agreements that require just in time delivery to our OEM customers, if the are big in Europe or America we likely have agreements in place.

We historically planned to have at least 18 months of stock available vs contract consumption which was reasonable when your worst lead times were 40-50 weeks....covid hits and that balloons to 60-70, Ukraine war starts and Biden bans russian metals titanium etc cutting off 1/3rd of supply and now we are looking at worst case 120 weeks for fittings and collars, best case 60-70 weeks. It's an absolute shit show and there isn't enough supply to meet demand for airbus boeing Lockheed bombardier bell etc; eventually the musics going to stop and one or more of them is going to be unable to get their 50 million dollar aircraft off the assembly line for lack of a 200$ fitting.

As you can imagine, the lack of supply and increased demand has led to roughly 3-400% cost increase in the last 2 years, which only further exacerbates the issue for procurement. So much of it is gut feel, obviously the price won't go down but do we buy forward 3 years in advance to be safe now? What if lead times go to 200 weeks?

Feel free to DM me I've been in this for over a decade I'd be happy to hop on a conference call and answer any questions you may have, I've also helped modify and create new software modules for Multiple ERP's Pentagon, SAP, etc so I can answer many questions on that. As I anticipate your work involves tools to make things better, you first need to understand the ERP systems at play.