One of the common questions we hear is "how can we improve our on time delivery performance?" With increased competition and a need to rank well in supply chains this topic is very meaningful to most businesses.

Where as some parts of industry have had this issue since day one many other business sectors are finding that this same pressure to comply with 100% on time deliveries is now a very current issue. This article highlights a number of areas to consider as you improve your business' on time delivery performance.

If you are unable to control how work enters your business then you could be putting the control of your resources at risk. The more you deviate from what your business considers 'normal' the more you strain how the business operates. In a specific sense this might be taking on the wrong kind of work, where you don't have the ability to deliver easily. From a generic point of view there are issues such as capacity to consider, you might just not have enough resources to deal with a specific order at a certain point in time.

As long as you understand your situation you can come up with a suitable solution. In the examples above this might mean some form of competency 'test' prior to work being quoted for, or an agreement with a local agency so that labour levels can be flexed as required.

Understanding how you take work into your business will have a great effect on your ability to deliver on time.

Leading on from the previous comments about capacity is the need to understand your scheduling approach. Many businesses do not consider their schedules from an aggregated point of view to make sure that their capacity and their schedule are aligned. Once work has been allowed into the business it needs to be scheduled so that the necessary work can be completed prior to delivery. It sounds obvious I know, but it is worth restating because so many businesses get caught up in day to day fire fighting that standing back to check some of these fundamental issues doesn't happen. When it doesn't happen you end up in a negative cycle where more work comes in, the backlog increases, and then more work comes in....

Get your schedules aligned with your capacity and reduce the unnecessary fire fighting activities.

Now that you have your capacity and schedules aligned and are no longer letting work into your business that you can't do, you need to make sure that the schedules and plans that are in place are being executed in a timely fashion. This kind of tracking can be done as a daily meeting, or using visual management, or using exception reporting from an MIS / MRPII / ERP system. The key here is to get some kind of feedback on a regular basis that allows you to know if things are going to plan.

Find a way to track progress and ensure that there are no surprises.

In the course of delivering your products and services you will find that there are a number of key tasks that need to happen. These tasks must happen like clockwork or you risk getting into a reactive fire fighting mode. The first step is to identify these tasks, a simple mapping exercise is usually sufficient in order to do this. The second step is to define who needs to do what and when. Most likely there will be a daily or weekly frequency to these tasks and so they are easy to incorporate into a routine.

Like the progress of the orders being worked on these routine tasks also need to be monitored.

The areas mentioned above form the basis of a good on time delivery mechanism.

- Know how to let work into your business.

- Align your schedules with your capacity.

- Track progress and correct quickly.

- Regulate your key tasks through simple routines.

By doing the above you will then be able to start working on improving your order delivery system rather than fire fighting the issues that crop up.

Smartspeed helps businesses like yours to work out which factors can improve your on-time delivery so that you can have happier customers and higher profits.

If you would like more information then please get in touch with us by using the contact form below.