OTIF Delivery Performance: The Mid-Year Health Check

June’s stocktake is done, the books are balanced, and the second half of the year is staring you down. From here, order volumes only climb — and every crack in your delivery operation gets wider under peak-season pressure. So before the rush arrives, ask one hard question: when a customer places an order, do they receive exactly what they ordered, exactly when you promised it?

That single question is what OTIF delivery performance measures. And it tells you more about the health of your supply chain than any other number on your dashboard.

What Is OTIF Delivery Performance?

OTIF stands for On-Time In-Full. An order only counts as a success if it arrives at the agreed time and in the correct quantity. Late but complete? Fail. On time but two cartons short? Also a fail. That strictness is exactly what makes it valuable.

Because OTIF is a composite measure, it reflects how well every link in your chain is pulling together — forecasting, inventory management, warehouse operations, transport planning and customer communication. A strong OTIF score means those functions are in sync. A weak one means something upstream is quietly leaking money, and your customers are the ones finding out first.

The Six Metrics to Review Alongside OTIF

A proper mid-year health check looks at OTIF in context. Pull these six numbers together and read them as a set:

• OTIF percentage — the headline figure. What share of orders arrived on time and in full?
• On-time delivery rate — isolates the timing side. If this is high but OTIF is low, your problem is stock, not transport.
• Delivery accuracy rate — right product, right quantity, right place. Picking and packing live here.
• Failed delivery percentage — every failed drop is a double cost: the wasted trip and the redelivery.
• Average delivery lead time — how long customers actually wait from order to door, not what the brochure promises.
• Customer delivery complaints — the human data. Complaints often surface problems weeks before the metrics do.

Why OTIF Delivery Performance Is the Ultimate Reliability Measure

Here’s the shift many SA businesses miss: customers no longer judge suppliers on speed alone. They judge on reliability. A wholesaler would rather have a delivery that lands every Thursday without fail than one that’s occasionally a day early and occasionally three days late.

Consistently delivering on time and in full strengthens relationships, improves retention and builds the kind of reputation that wins referrals. Miss deliveries, though, and the damage compounds fast — stock shortages on your customer’s shelves, production lines standing still, lost sales, and in many supply agreements, hard financial penalties. In cold chain logistics the stakes are even higher, because a late delivery can also mean a spoiled one.

How to Run Your Mid-Year OTIF Review

Set aside a morning and work through four questions:

• What’s the trend? Compare OTIF month by month for the first half of the year. A slow slide matters more than one bad week.
• Where do misses come from? Categorise every failed or short delivery — stockouts, warehouse errors, transport delays, address or communication issues. Patterns will jump out.
• What are customers saying? Read the complaints, not just the count. Recurring themes point straight at the bottleneck.
• Can your capacity carry the second half? Test whether current inventory levels, warehouse processes and transport capacity can hold your service targets when demand climbs.

Businesses that monitor OTIF closely spot issues early, fix them cheaply, and hold their service standards when it matters most. Those that don’t usually discover their problems in December — from an unhappy customer.

OTIF Delivery Performance: FAQ

What is a good OTIF score?

World-class operations aim for 95% and above. Anything below 90% signals recurring operational issues worth investigating, and major retailers increasingly set OTIF thresholds in their supplier agreements.

How often should OTIF be measured?

Track it monthly at minimum, weekly if you run high volumes. The mid-year and pre-peak-season reviews are the two moments to go deeper than the dashboard.

Does outsourcing transport improve OTIF?

It can, significantly. A specialist logistics partner brings route planning, vehicle capacity and delivery discipline that most businesses can’t justify building in-house — especially for temperature-sensitive freight.

Your customers are measuring your reliability whether you are or not. If your mid-year numbers show room to improve, LMC Express can help — our multi-temperature load consolidation and refrigerated transport network is built to get orders where they need to be, on time and in full, across South Africa. Get in touch with our team today and head into peak season with confidence.