Fluent Order Management named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Order Management Systems, Q1 2025

Access report

How to calculate your On-Time In Full (OTIF) delivery rate

And what you should be tracking

Make sure you delight customers by capturing the data you need to calculate your OTIF rate

By Nicola Kinsella

Jul 2, 2024

Think about when you place an order. You’re excited. You want the item. And if it’s delivered on time, when it was promised, in full and with no items missing—it feels good. It’s a customer promise satisfied. But how do you make sure you’re keeping your promise? By tracking your On-Time In Full (OTIF) delivery rate. Let’s look at the data it requires.

Your delivery promise—or estimated delivery date (EDD)

The first thing you need to know is the promise you made to the customer. When they placed an online order, what was the delivery or pickup date and time shown to them at checkout? These need to be stored as values on the order so you can compare it to the actual delivery date or ready for pickup date/time. And if you have multiple shipments associated with a single order, you may need to track these at the shipment level, then roll the values up to the order. But while capturing the promise is a good start, you’ll also need to capture the actuals.

Actual delivery date or date/time of pickup availability

On what day did the order actually get delivered? Or when was it actually ready for pickup? In the case of delivery, you’ll need to store the carrier tracking number associated with the order, then trigger an event to scrape the actual delivery date after a certain period of time from the carrier’s website. And store it on the order. When it comes to pickup availability, you’ll need to capture the timestamp of when the ‘Ready for Pickup’ notification was sent to the customer. What else do you need to track?

Unfulfilled items

Were all items filled on time? Was anything late? Were any items canceled because they weren’t available? If one or more items didn’t get delivered on time, or weren’t ready for pickup on time, then an order does not meet the OTIF criteria. So you’ll need a way to track on the order whether there were any unfulfilled items. If your business involves item substitution, you’ll also need to consider whether substitutions count towards OTIF, or exclude an order from OTIF criteria.

OTIF Rate Calculation

Your On-Time In Full rate is the percentage of orders that were delivered, or made ready for pickup, on or before when they were promised to the customer, without any items missing, divided by your total number of orders. But in order to accurately calculate your OTIF rate, you’ll need to make sure you capture the right data.

Summary

To recap, here’s a list of data you’ll need to understand your OTIF rate:

  • Promise – Delivery date
  • Promise – Pickup date/time
  • Carrier tracking number
  • Actual – Delivery date
  • Actual – Ready for pickup notification date/time
  • Unfulfilled items

And if you have split shipments, you’ll need to track that data at the shipment level and roll it up to the order level. But many organizations struggle to do this well.

If that sounds hard, it may be time to consider a modern order management like Fluent Order Management. One that lets you extend the solution with additional attributes against orders and shipments, and lets you create rules that will write data to those fields at any point in the order orchestration process.

Interested in learning more about how to capture the data you need to calculate your OTIF rate in a modern order management system like Fluent Order Management? If so, contact us today.

This site is registered on wpml.org as a development site. Switch to a production site key to remove this banner.