cnx_vinyl/docs/production-timeline.md

Production Timeline: Order to Delivered Record

How long an order actually takes, stage by stage. This is the time dimension of process-flow.md, which lists all nine stages and every check but no durations.

The repo asserts turnaround as the core regional advantage in four places — "competes on turnaround and freight against EU/US plants", "in-house galvanics removes days of turnaround", "validate turnaround against the regional pitch", "get a written turnaround SLA" — without ever putting a number on it. This page puts numbers on it so the claim can be tested at Making Vinyl instead of repeated.

Every figure is an estimate from industry norms and this repo's own equipment data. Nothing is vendor-confirmed and no order has ever run through this plant. Durations are working days unless stated; divide by 5 for weeks, and note that Thai public holidays run to 16–20 days a year, clustered heavily around Songkran in April.

The headline

Configuration	Plant-controlled	Including customer gates
Launch (bridge stampers, no in-house cutting or galvanics)	22–49 days	~6 to 17 weeks
Mature (full chain in-house)	11.5–22 days	~4 to 11.5 weeks
Repress from an archived mother, no changes	6.5–11.5 days	~1.5 to 2.5 weeks

These are straight sums of the stage table below, plus 9–35 days of customer gate time for the first two rows. They are wide because the stages are wide, and they are not a quotable lead time — see "What to promise a customer" at the end, which adds queue and buffer on top.

Reported EU/US plant lead times run roughly 10 to 16 weeks for a standard black LP, down from the 6-to-9-month peak of 2021–22. That figure is an industry impression gathered in conversation, not a surveyed one, and it should be tested at Making Vinyl alongside the price. One published data point: Record Industry (Haarlem, NL) quotes 3 weeks to test pressings (from complete files, or from a supplied lacquer's arrival) and then 9 to 11 weeks for the finished order after the customer approves the test pressings and the artwork (calculator FAQ, checked October 2026), which on the same reference point compares with the 7 to 9 week mature quote below. Two cautions on the comparison:

• It is not like-for-like. The EU/US figure is a quoted lead time carrying queue and buffer; the CNX figures above are unbuffered stage sums. The honest comparison is against the quote table at the end of this page — 7–9 weeks mature, 10–14 launch.
• On that basis the launch configuration is at parity, not ahead. Its 10–14 week quote sits inside the EU/US 10–16 week band, and its unbuffered worst case of 17 weeks is beyond it. The regional advantage comes from freight and time zone at launch, and only becomes a manufacturing advantage once cutting and plating come in-house. That matters, because launch is what the first two years actually sell.

Bringing cutting and galvanics in-house takes roughly 1.5 to 5 weeks out of the lead time — replacing a 13–27 day outsourced metal block plus freight with 4–7 days of in-house cutting, plating and stamper prep. The spread is wide because the outsourced block is the part nobody has measured. That is the commercial case for the galvanics line stated in time rather than in the stamper cost that revenue-model.md counts separately.

Two tracks run in parallel

A full-service order is not one chain. The metal path and the packaging path run concurrently and converge at assembly, and the packaging path is the one that most often slips, because it waits on artwork the customer owes and on a print partner who is not us.

flowchart LR
    subgraph M[Metal and record path]
        A[Audio intake] --> B[Mastering] --> C[Cutting]
        C --> D[Galvanics] --> E[Stamper prep] --> F[Test pressing]
        F --> G[Production run] --> H[Finishing]
    end
    subgraph P[Packaging path]
        X[Artwork received] --> Y[Proof and Delta E approval]
        Y --> Z[Carton and sleeve print run]
    end
    H --> I[Assembly and packaging]
    Z --> I
    I --> J[Fulfilment]

Printed jackets from a local carton partner typically need 10 to 20 working days from approved artwork. That fits comfortably underneath the metal path, but only if artwork lands early. When a label delivers artwork after approving the test pressing, the jackets become the critical path and every day of metalwork saved is wasted.

Consequence for the order intake process: artwork deadline is effectively a fourth approval gate and should be contracted as one, alongside the three artist gates in process-flow.md. It is not currently modelled as a gate anywhere in the repo.

Stage by stage

Times below are elapsed scheduled duration for one title, not touch labour. The "launch" column reflects the phased entry in total-investment.md: bridge stampers from Stamper Discs, lacquer cutting brokered through their EU partners or bought direct (SST in Frankfurt already cuts for Poy Records, see the vendor landscape), and no mastering room of our own.

#	Stage	Launch	Mature	Notes
1	Audio intake and technical QA	1–2	1–2	Checksums, format, levels, side-length vs format. Rejects here are cheap; rejects later are not
-	Gate: master plan approved	customer	customer	2–10 days in practice
2	Vinyl mastering	3–7	2–4	Launch: external engineer or partner. Mature: in-house room, and queue depth becomes ours to manage
-	Gate: master approved	customer	customer	2–10 days; more if the artist wants revisions
3	Lathe cutting to lacquer	-	1–2	Includes test cut, groove microscope, dead-wax scribe
4	Silvering and electroforming	-	2–4	Three generations plus XRF, metrology, mother listening check
5	Stamper prep	-	1	Punch, back-finish, coin, concentricity
3–5	Outsourced cut + metal (launch only)	10–20	-	Stamper Discs, Sheffield; queue is theirs, not ours
-	Stamper freight UK → TH + customs	3–7	-	Air freight; nickel travels well, unlike lacquer
6	Press setup and test pressing	1	0.5–1	Mold change, stamper mount, warm-up, 10–20 TPs
-	TP to artist + gate: TP approved	5–15	5–15	Courier plus listening time. The single largest customer-side block
7	Production run	1–5	1–3	Throughput table below
8	Finishing, assembly, packaging	2–4	2–3	Trim is inline; shrink and jacket assembly are labour-bound
9	Fulfilment and dispatch	1–3	1–2	Bulk pallet, or per-parcel dropship on an ongoing basis

Two things the table deliberately does not hide:

• Stages 3, 4 and 5 collapse into one 10–20 day external block at launch, and its duration is not ours to control. That is precisely why roadmap.md item 14 calls for a written turnaround SLA with Stamper Discs. Without one, the whole quoted lead time rests on a supplier's goodwill, and they have no documented Asian customers to set expectations from.
• Lacquers do not fly. A cut lacquer is soft nitrocellulose, heat- and shock-sensitive, and wants plating within roughly 24 to 72 hours. The launch configuration is sound precisely because it never ships one: audio goes to Europe as a file, the lacquer is cut and plated in the same region, and only finished nickel stampers make the journey. Any future arrangement that cuts in Thailand and plates abroad, or the reverse — would be a quality risk, not just a slower schedule.

Production run throughput

From the fleet assumptions in scale.md, after the 60–70% overall effectiveness already applied there.

Fleet	Good records/day	300 units	500	1,000	2,000
Launch: 1 semi-auto, 1 shift	~300–450	<1 day	1–2	2–3	5–7
Duplex: 2 semi-auto, 2 shifts	~1,150–1,790	<1	<1	1	1–2
Mature: 2 semi + 2 auto, 2 shifts	~3,300–5,000	<1	<1	<1	<1

Read these as press-days, not calendar days. At mature scale no single title gets the whole plant; it gets a scheduled slot. Past roughly 60% utilisation the queue in front of the press starts to dominate everything in the table above it, and quoted lead time decouples from process time entirely.

That is the standard failure mode for pressing plants and it is worth stating plainly: lead time is a capacity decision, not a process decision. A plant running at 90% quotes 16 weeks with the same equipment that quotes 6 weeks at 50%. Any turnaround promise made to the market is implicitly a promise to hold spare capacity.

Small runs invert the arithmetic, though not as sharply as it first looks. At 300 units on the semi-automatic line the run is 5 to 8 hours, most of a shift, once the 60–70% effectiveness above is applied; it is roughly an hour on the full mature fleet. What dominates a small order is not the pressing but the setup, the approvals and the assembly, all of which cost the same at 300 units as at 3,000, which is exactly the boutique/color work the semi-automatic line exists to serve, per pressing-line.md. Small runs are not faster to deliver; they are only cheaper to press.

Repress: the shortest path in the plant

A repress of an existing title with no artwork or audio changes skips stages 1 through 3 and all three artist gates. If a mother was archived, a fresh stamper is pulled and the order runs:

Step	Days
Pull stamper from archived mother	1–2
Stamper prep	1
Press setup, first-article check	0.5
Production run (1,000)	1–3
Finishing, assembly, dispatch	3–5
Total	~7–11 working days

Two commercial consequences worth acting on:

• Choose the 3-step process and archive fathers and mothers. Stamper Discs offers both 1-step and 3-step. A 1-step stamper is faster and cheaper for a one-off, but it is a single-use part: there is no mother to go back to, so a repress restarts at lacquer cutting and costs the customer six weeks and a new cutting fee. 3-step buys the two-week repress, and that repress is the highest-margin order the plant will ever take. For the planned catalogue company beside the plant it is also what makes small, demand-led runs possible (own catalogue). Decided (October 2026): the plant keeps the father as well as the mother of every side.
• How many represses a mother carries. The common rule of thumb is about 10 stamper sets per mother before it degrades (Third Man Pressing's FAQ; a Nashville plater quoted by WPLN, both checked October 2026); quality-minded sources give fewer: 5 (The VinyLab), 6 to 8 (Stereo Review, 1962, quoted on pspatialaudio.com). At 1,000 to 2,000 pressings a stamper that is roughly 10,000 to 20,000 records per side, or about ten represses of a few hundred to 1,500 copies. A father grows about 5 to 10 mothers (pspatialaudio.com; Third Man: up to 10), so with the father archived a worn mother is replaced by plating a new one (about an hour in the bath plus the listening check) instead of re-cutting, and a title reaches roughly 50,000 to 100,000 records before a new lacquer. These are industry rules of thumb, not this plant's figures: the galvanics vendors are asked for theirs (galvanics), and ERPNext counts stamper sets on each mother's serial number.
• The archive is an asset with a shelf life. It needs the storage conditions and the genealogy records that traceability.md already specifies, and a stated retention policy: how long a customer's fathers and mothers are kept before they are scrapped or returned. That policy does not exist yet and should be in the customer contract, not discovered later.

What to promise a customer

A defensible quoted lead time is not the sum of the mature column. It carries queue and it carries a buffer, and it should be quoted from the last customer gate, not from order date — the plant cannot be held to a clock the customer keeps stopping.

Order type	Quote	Basis
New title, full service, launch config	10–14 weeks	Stage sum plus external metal queue plus buffer
New title, full service, mature config	7–9 weeks
New title, customer supplies jackets	−1 to 2 weeks	Removes the print path
Repress from archived mother	2–3 weeks
Rush slot	premium, capped per month	Only credible with reserved capacity

Quote in weeks from test-pressing approval, with the pre-approval stages quoted separately as "typically X weeks, subject to your approvals". Every plant that quotes from order date and gets caught by a slow artist ends up explaining itself.

The price calculator on the artist platform quotes from this table in exactly this form, and a fan-funded campaign shows its fans an estimated ship month built the same way: campaign close, plus the typical pre-approval stages, plus the quote above.

Honest caveats

• No order has ever run through this plant. These are planning numbers built from vendor throughput data and industry norms, and early production will run slower than any of them while the reject rate settles — revenue-model.md already concedes the same about its 5–10% reject allowance.
• The external metal block at launch is unmeasured. 10–20 days is an industry-typical figure, not a Stamper Discs commitment. Get it in writing before it appears in a customer quote.
• Equipment lead times are absent from the repo entirely and do not affect this page, but do affect project-timeline.md, which is where they matter.
• The competitive comparison is the least validated part. Whether regional labels will actually pay for 7 weeks instead of 14 plus freight is the same open question as the 3.50–4.60 USD blended price, and both should be tested in the same conversations at Making Vinyl. A turnaround advantage nobody pays a premium for is a cost, not a moat.