← Business Metric: Operational (all topics)
OTIF (on-time in-full) & fill rate
What it is
The share of customer orders delivered complete and on the promised date, and the share of demand met from available stock. They measure service reliability rather than cost or speed
Retail and industrial customers increasingly impose penalties for falling below agreed levels
Impact on industries
- Service reliability is often a stronger driver of customer retention than price, particularly for production-line customers
- It exposes the trade-off between inventory investment and service, making the cost of reliability explicit
- High fill rates are usually bought with inventory, so the measure conflicts directly with working capital discipline
- Definitions vary widely - measured by order, line or unit - so cross-company comparison is unreliable