4 Departments, 1 KPI and 4 Different Numbers: All of Them Were Called OTIF

I watched four departments report four different OTIF values for the same company while customers deducted penalties based on their own.

Image by Samir Saci

At a company I worked with, business teams had started building their own reporting apps.

Finance had one, marketing had one, supply chain had one, and procurement had one.

Each of them showed OTIF, on-time in-full, the number that says whether customers get what they ordered when they asked for it.

The four letters, and what each one is actually measuring — (Image by Samir Saci)

And each showed a different value, for the same company, over the same period.

No harmonisation, no documentation, and all four were feeding decisions.

Every app rendered a clean dashboard, which is exactly why nobody noticed.

The worst part was not the disagreement.

If the correct definition was finance’s, then logistics was tuning its entire operation against a number that was wrong, and doing it diligently.

Why this KPI, of all of them