OTIF (On Time In Full) is a pretty harsh metric. It measures the promises you make to your customers, rather than a percentage of achievement. If your customer orders 1000 units for Thursday and you deliver 990 of them on the Thursday and the balance on the Friday, OTIF says that’s a score of zero.
You can see why so many people avoid either measuring this or find an easier way to measure on time delivery. If you are delivering projects / batch production, you can understand that it is easy to miss a top score by quite some way.
The fork in the road
There is a deeper lesson here. There is a fork in the road, when it comes to using a measure like OTIF. The more comfortable route (initially) is to minimise the situation, choose a more appealing way to measure on time delivery. In the example given above, you could argue that on time delivery was at 99% (990/1000). You could argue that, but it doesn’t change the fact that the delivery wasn’t all there (‘in full’) on the day it was required.
The other route is to accept our failings and learn from them where possible. There will always be a degree of chance in business performance, we accept this. But, from a managing risk perspective, if there is a lesson to be learned, to reduce future occurrences of delivery failure, why wouldn’t we want to discover it?
Time to get honest
If you choose to accept the failure, you can choose to reflect on what you, your team and your business don’t do well. Be real with yourselves. Be open about where your organisation, management, execution and planning leave something to be desired.
Do you have blind spots where you know that you aren’t as strong as you would like to be?
Are there gaps in experience and knowledge that leave you susceptible to failure?
Is there a lack of documentation in the business?
Does your initial staff training provide the team with what they need to be effective?
Once you have decided on what you need to do to become more effective at delivering on time, you can ask ‘what does good look like?’. You can define how you want these shortcomings to be handled in the future.
What does brilliant planning look like for your business?
What does perfect execution do on a day to day basis?
How would your team communicate with each other, if they were amazing?
Answering these questions provides a quick and simple mini vision for your improvement activities.
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If you don’t use the OTIF metric, I am sure that you will have something similar in your business that has an equal impact. Don’t shy away from the ‘scores on the doors’. Take the punch to the gut and then reflect on what you are missing. Ignoring the opportunity to learn, accept and improve robs everyone in the business from achieving higher levels of performance. Don’t miss the opportunity!
You add the meaning
And remember, the metric is just a metric. The business doesn’t care about how you feel about it. It needs high levels of delivery performance to satisfy customer orders. It doesn’t have an opinion on the matter, it just has inputs, processes and outputs. We are the ones that put meaning into things and putting the wrong meaning into our delivery metrics can push us either in the right direction or the wrong direction. Tackle the challenge and give the business what it needs.