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.)<p>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.<p>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.<p>It seemed like a good system, albeit old-fashioned.<p>This has got to be a cross-industry problem and not limited to physical, requires-some-integration products. Software APIs fall into the category.<p>Is there an industry out there that does a good job of this? What's a best practice?<p>Thanks very much.