The paper deals with the investigation of the critical factor of the supply chain, with regards to time. The literature review can give a background to understand and handle the reasons and consequences of the growing importance of time. It analyses the time- and place-value of products and it evaluates time by showing theoretical functions as well. By using utility functions to represent the value of various delivery-times for the different participants in the supply chain, including the final customers, it proves through the Kano-model, that the choices, behaviour and willingness of payment of time-sensitive and non time-sensitive consumers are different for varying lead times, so for optimization soft computing techniques must be applied. © 2009 IEEE.