A company’s on-time-in-full (OTIF) delivery rate is a reflection of its reliability, efficiency, and commitment to meeting customer expectations.

OTIF measures the percentage of orders delivered to customers when and as they expect. This metric can have a significant impact on your bottom line by driving repeat business, and serves as a leading indicator for overall operational health.

In other words, just the kind of thing that makes senior execs sit up and listen.

Operations leaders are expected to drive more resilient and adaptable supply chains, but are often given little wiggle-room for the kind of opex investments that you need for real change. CFOs are more comfortable splashing out on physical devices like RFID guns because they feel like an asset whereas software and training feel like they might dissolve into the aether, leaving the company impoverished, with nothing to sell off in the event of bankruptcy.

But OTIF is a beautiful metric for bridging the worlds of operational and commercial thinking. It’s intuitive, even for executives that have not once seen the inside of a warehouse, to grasp this idea of promises being kept to customers.

If you want to unlock a budget for data-driven logistics, this is the conversation you’ve got to be having. You might be surprised to discover that somewhere in the c-suite dashboard there is an official OTIF rate being reported, usually somewhere around 95%. This is a magic number that makes executives feel safe, and is quickly arrived at by defining ‘on time’ as ‘before the final ETA we gave the customer when the delivery was already late’, and ‘in full’ to mean ‘not currently showing up as an inventory discrepancy.’

Having disabused them of the idea that fulfilment is hovering close to perfection, you may undergo a tense moment. Are you about to lose your job? Or be handed an enormous budget with the broad remit to put the ship to rights? Probably neither. You’re more likely to get 20 questions as your prospective sponsor gets to grips with the messy reality of operations. Perhaps you forget all about this conversation, and then months later get a call asking you to put together a formal proposal for a large-scale digital transformation project.

So how do you make the case that tech can shift the needle? Well, high OTIF rates start at home. What’s your OTIF rate as a recipient? How would you go about measuring that? You’re going to want warehouse-level data about load arrival times, and to ensure that initial inspections, before putaway, are being carried out rigorously.

If you yourself haven’t set foot in a warehouse in the last five years or so, it’s now your turn for a come-to-jesus moment. If your company is anything like… every other company in North America, your receiving process will be falling apart at the seams. Loads will be showing up whenever. Inspection will mean: looks like the pallet didn’t get dropped off a building, and the average worker will have been working there for about three weeks.

First order of business: get receiving under control. Track precise arrival times, give carriers and suppliers hell so they get their act together, get the schedule running so warehouse workers get to go home on time and be with their families. Needless to say, your company’s 1990s-mindset ERP system is not going to facilitate that. But you don’t need a huge budget to implement cutting edge SaaS dock scheduling at one or two warehouses.

When you sit down with the CFO or CEO again, you can now have a different kind of conversation. You can talk about carrier reliability and relationships. You can show how data enables accountability and better decision-making. And you can make a compelling argument that visibility helps the company keep its promises to customers.