If you ever want a metric to help you focus your continuous improvement activities, OTIF is a great candidate!
What is OTIF?
OTIF stands for On Time In Full.
It is an on time delivery metric that can help drive the right kinds of behaviours and thinking in a business.
But, what does it mean? In short, it is about keeping delivery promises.
If you said that you would deliver fifty items by lunchtime today, that’s what you need to do. You don’t get any points for delivering forty nine, or all of them two hours late.
It’s either a promise kept or a promise broken. This is how business relationships are measured and therefore OTIF is a better driver than other kinds of on time delivery measures.
The benefits of high OTIF
Every continuous improvement project should have a purpose. There are many benefits to consistently high OTIF.
From personal experience, the increased business that comes from this performance is one of the best outcomes. Many customers aren’t looking for a wow factor, they are looking for reliability and consistency. This alone can help build a business.
One really important note here is that consistent, high, OTIF requires a systems mentality. Instead of thinking about individual orders and operations, you start to think about the processes that link together. Managing each of the individual activities is difficult enough on their own. When you pull all of them together, to run the business, this can become a nightmare.
Thinking about systems helps to straighten all of this out and provides your team with enough continuous improvement direction to keep them constructively busy for a long while!
The true OTIF goal
If you are considering OTIF as a compass for your continuous improvement projects then this is the sub-text:
You want to achieve a consistent, high, OTIF level without blood, sweat and tears.
I see organisations that achieve a decent on time delivery performance, but it comes at a cost. When managers only see the activity, and not the system, hard work becomes the answer too often.
Burning people out, to keep customers happy, isn’t a long term strategy.
Use PDCA for full effect
If you are wanting a place to start with using OTIF as a drive for continuous improvement, don’t forget the PDCA cycle.
If you aren’t familiar with this acronym, it stands for Plan, Do, Check and Act.
In short, come up with a game plan, take the first few steps, check that you are on the right tracks and decide whether to continue or change your approach, before you carry on.
Identify your OTIF gaps and use PDCA to control your changes. Every improvement you make should move the on time delivery needle when you are measuring your business’ performance.
The On Time Delivery Course
If you need some tried and tested improvement ideas, to raise your OTIF performance, then check out my online course.
The On Time Delivery Course is a practical, step by step, course designed to help you see the delivery system in your business and how to improve it.
The course also comes with a 30 day email coaching programme, to keep you on track as you pull apart and re-build key parts of your delivery system.
There are no recurring subscription fees, it’s a one time payment and you can find out more about the course here.
OTIF – the double whammy
I hope this article has given you some ideas on how to use OTIF as a way to focus your continuous improvement efforts, whilst providing real benefits for your business.
A lot of people want to back away from the OTIF discussion because it looks hard. It is the ugly measure that most production managers want to ignore, if they aren’t already at 100%.
But, this is the reality of delivering. It is either on time or it isn’t. It hurts (in many ways) when you aren’t on time, so let’s fix it.
Good OTIF is where business growth lies and achieving this without blood, sweat and tears is the key to sustained growth.
Enjoy fixing your on time delivery problems. It is worth it!
