Use Angles for SAP to Measure, Analyze and Improve Your OTIF 

January 13, 2023

It’s safe to say that a satisfied customer is one who is happy with their purchases and delivery times. When it comes to a company’s supply chain, customer satisfaction can be boiled down to a single concept: on-time, in-full (OTIF) delivery. At your company, teams are likely already experiencing the headaches caused by delays with logistics, shipments, and stock levels. While nowadays nobody is immune to these pains, zeroing in on the exact causes of your OTIF rate will get you back in control of your supply chain management.

Let’s take a look at how to feel better about your OTIF.

Define What OTIF Means to Your Customers

To keep your customers happy, so they don’t buy from your competitors next time, it is important to deliver your products on time. This puts pressure on your supply chain, team, and the entire organization.

Alignment between customer service, logistics, sourcing/procurement, fulfillment, and planning is important but complex because of siloed departments and teams. KPIs such as efficiency, reducing stock levels, and optimizing logistics costs can conflict with your ambition to deliver on time.

Furthermore, large data volumes and the intricacy of SAP data structures can add to your woes. Many organizations calculate OTIF in different ways. Have you been able to define what “on time” means for your organization? After you have defined and implemented a meaningful KPI, the next challenge is to improve your OTIF.

Assess Your Customer Relationships and Satisfaction Levels

A good place to start with understanding your approach to customer satisfaction is to define a few areas where you may be doing well or can improve on regarding customer service. Do you:

• Know if your customers are satisfied?
• Measure customer satisfaction?
• Have a plan for continuous improvement of your customers’ satisfaction levels?

Ways to improve these areas include:

• Ask your customers if they are satisfied with your deliveries. Opening discussions with customers will highlight improvements you can make to enhance their satisfaction levels.
• Analyze how they describe their satisfaction. What matters to one organization might not be important to another. Digging into the priorities of your different customer groups is the fastest way to identify the fixes they need.

While these areas can all be measured, giving your company a number to aim for, there is often a gap between your numbers and true customer happiness. KPIs can fall short on some of the complexities and details of your orders, including incomplete and third-party orders, orders where a credit check failed, and even delivery note deletions. A true OTIF can be elusive, especially when unknown factors are lurking in your data.

Use Angles for SAP to Find Your True OTIF Numbers

SAP provides various ways for your company to track orders, shipments, and deliveries. It is complex and has many variables that may differ from one customer to the next. For example, there are at least five different options to measure “customer arrival date.” All your best efforts to measure satisfaction, per above, will be challenged by SAP’s complex data-tracking methods. And this is where Angles for SAP by insightsoftware solves these challenges.

Angles for SAP links to your SAP ECC or S/4 HANA system and takes the complete process configuration out of your SAP system. Angles reads the data and processes you use to analyze and bring the data into context, calculating KPIs, and measuring backorders. It provides all the information your team wants from their SAP system. Angles for SAP is a plug-and-play solution providing out-of-the-box capabilities that, within a couple days or even hours, groups orders efficiently and eliminates data pollution, both of which are a great start to clarifying your OTIF and providing more value to your customers.

Providing In-Depth Views Into How Angles for SAP Boosts OTIF

Recently, insightsoftware broke this all down in a webinar created and led by Richard den Ouden, the co-founder of Angles of SAP. The on-demand webinar is available here. Watch this webinar and learn how to:

• Measure OTIF in different ways (requested, first confirmed, last confirmed date)
• Analyze your OTIF
• Improve your OTIF by preventing future backorders
• Discover how SAP data quality can hurt your OTIF
• Implement a control framework to manage your end-to-end supply chain

“If you deliver the right products on time, offering a regular price and good quality, you will have happy customers,” Richard den Ouden, co-founder of Angles of SAP.

In addition to the webinar, you can access an instant demo for Angles for SAP here.