I had to devote a large percentage of a previous job to juggling supply chain changes from 3rd party suppliers with the expectations of my customers. (We're talking semiconductor components.)

Part of our value prop was giving our customers better-than-average lead times for last orders and deliveries. We were somewhat able to do this by sticking to mainstream technologies, but we were a bit player & sometimes had to violate our policy.

We used a standard document to communicate scope, SKUs, timeframes, reasoning, ... and would issue these to our salesforce to personally insure our customers got the word.

It seemed like a good system, albeit old-fashioned.

This has got to be a cross-industry problem and not limited to physical, requires-some-integration products. Software APIs fall into the category.

Is there an industry out there that does a good job of this? What's a best practice?

Thanks very much.