OTIF & Dock-to-Stock
A single OTIF percentage tells you that something is wrong but not what. Split into its two halves it becomes actionable — because late-but-complete and on-time-but-short have completely different causes and completely different fixes.
Your data never leaves your browser — everything is calculated on your device.Why the two halves must stay separate
On-time and in-full fail for entirely different reasons and are fixed by entirely different people.
| Failure | Usual causes | Who fixes it |
|---|---|---|
| Late but complete | Dispatch scheduling, transport capacity, cut-off discipline, dock congestion, documentation delays | Warehouse operations and transport |
| On time but short | Stock availability, inaccurate inventory, allocation rules, supplier shortages | Planning and procurement |
Reporting only the combined number guarantees that the monthly review produces a general exhortation to do better rather than a specific action. Split it, and each half lands on a desk that can actually do something.
OTIF is not on-time × in-full
The two failures are usually correlated — an order short on stock often waits for the shortage and then ships late as well. Multiplying the two percentages assumes they are independent and will generally understate your true OTIF. The honest approach is to measure it directly, order by order. Where you cannot, this calculator shows the mathematical range your OTIF must fall inside, which is more useful than a false point estimate.
Dock-to-stock
Dock-to-stock is the time from a vehicle arriving to the goods being available to pick. It matters more than most warehouses treat it, because stock sitting in the receiving bay is invisible to the order system — you own it, you paid for it, and you still cannot sell it. A 48-hour dock-to-stock on a 21-day lead time is effectively a 10% extension of that lead time, and it feeds straight back into your safety stock requirement.
Most operations find the bottleneck is not unloading but the waiting between stages: goods sit after unloading waiting for QC, then after QC waiting for a put-away resource. The stage bars above show the split; the honest version includes the waiting, not just the touch time.
Common mistakes
- Measuring on-time against your own revised date. If a promised date slips and the new date is met, that is not on time. Measure against the date first confirmed to the customer.
- Counting the shipment date instead of the delivery date. Customers experience delivery. Dispatching on time and delivering late is a transport problem, not a success.
- Averaging dock-to-stock across all receipts. One import container with a long QC hold distorts the mean badly. Track the median and the 90th percentile — the tail is what hurts.
- Excluding waiting time. Adding up touch times gives a flattering number that nobody on the floor recognises. Measure arrival timestamp to stock-available timestamp.
- Treating OTIF as a warehouse KPI. Half of it is a planning number. Making the warehouse solely accountable for OTIF guarantees an argument every month and fixes nothing.
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