Glossary
On-time delivery
On-time delivery is the share of orders, jobs or shipments that met their promised date: fifty jobs due, forty-six on time, ninety-two percent. The percentage is worth almost nothing until you write down whose date counts, the one the customer asked for or the one you promised after looking at the schedule. Both are defensible. Only one tells you whether customers are happy.
01
Deciding whose promised date the number counts
One of the best weekly Scorecard rows in any business that delivers something, because the figure is available on a Friday and it moves with the week's decisions. Keep the count of jobs due beside it, so a green percentage on a quiet week does not get mistaken for a good one by a team reading quickly.
The definition is where this row gets gamed, usually with nobody intending to game anything. Rescheduling a promised date once it is clear you will miss it turns a late job into an on-time one, and the number climbs while customers get angrier. Count against the first date given, add a separate row for dates changed, and the percentage means something again.
Worked example: A cabinet maker reported ninety-six percent on time for a year while complaints climbed. Production had been moving promise dates in the scheduling system whenever a job slipped, which the software allowed and nobody had thought about. Measured against the date on the original order acknowledgment, on-time was seventy-one percent, most of it traced to two suppliers.
Sources: klipfolio.com/resources/kpi-examples; scm.ncsu.edu/scm-articles/article/performance-measurements-and-metrics-developing-collaborative-supplier-partnerships
Cycle time
Cycle time is how long one unit of work takes from start to finish: order received to order shipped, ticket opened to ticket closed.
02Lagging indicator
A lagging indicator reports a result after the period that produced it has closed: revenue, gross margin, employee turnover, satisfaction scores.
03Ratio metric
A ratio metric divides one number by another: win rate, cost per lead, revenue per employee, the percentage of orders shipped on time.
04KPI examples by department: sales, ops, finance, HR
Concrete KPI examples for each department in a small company, tagged leading or lagging and weekly or monthly, to help you build a Scorecard that works.
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