Fulfillment SLA Metrics

When a promise is vague, the bill is always specific

Most brands do not struggle because they lack ambition. They struggle because their fulfillment promises are not backed by metrics that everyone agrees on. Customers hear "ships today," retailers hear "compliance," and finance hears "do not get us fined." If you do not define and track fulfillment SLA metrics, each group will believe a different story until the day something breaks.

That break usually arrives in a very modern form: a tracking page that does not move, a late shipment email, or a retailer chargeback that reads like a parking ticket but costs far more. By then, the debate is not only about the miss. It is about whether your operation can see problems early enough to prevent repeats.

What an SLA means inside a warehouse

People toss around "SLA" like it is one number. In fulfillment, it is a bundle of commitments that cover receiving, outbound, and the extra steps that come with retail. Joel Malmquist, VP of Customer Experience at G10 Fulfillment, put the scope in plain terms: "An SLA is a Service Level Agreements for Receiving, Outbound, and B2B." That is the right starting point because a fast ship promise collapses if inventory is not available to pick.

Malmquist also explained how those commitments attach to clocks. "For receiving, the SLA is covers the time from the moment that we get a container on the dock with inventory in it, and how much time we have to count that in, and stow it away into the locations that we're going to pick from." Then he described the D2C cutoff logic that customers experience as shipping speed. "For D2C, which is an order through Shopify or on the merchant's website, if it's before noon, we're going to ship that order the same day." Metrics only help if they match this real-world timing.

The core fulfillment SLA metrics that actually predict success

Plenty of dashboards show on-time shipping. It is a useful metric, but it is a lagging one. If you want to stay ahead, you track the upstream metrics that explain why on-time shipping will be strong or weak tomorrow. The point is not to drown in numbers. The point is to monitor the few measures that signal whether the operation is drifting off course.

Receiving turn time is one of those measures because it decides when inventory becomes sellable. If receiving falls behind, your store can oversell, your backorders rise, and your warehouse spends the day triaging preventable shortages. A clean receiving SLA metric includes arrival time, count completion time, stow completion time, and exceptions that pause the clock for legitimate reasons. When that chain is visible, the business can plan around it instead of guessing.

On-time fulfillment rate is necessary, but it is not sufficient

On-time fulfillment rate matters because it is the closest thing to a universal score. Holly Woods, Director of Operations at G10 Fulfillment, described the level modern brands aim for: "We currently can boast a 99.9% on time fulfillment rate." That number is impressive, but the real lesson is that it is measurable, repeatable, and monitored. It is a standard you can operate against instead of a slogan you hope is true.

What most teams miss is that on-time is not one event. It is the outcome of many events, including pick speed, pack capacity, cutoffs, and carrier handoff. If your metric treats every order the same, you will miss the patterns that drive misses. A better approach is to segment by channel, service level, warehouse, and time of day, then compare those segments week over week so you can see drift before customers do.

Ship accuracy is the metric that protects your brand the quietest

Late orders make noise. Wrong orders make enemies. Accuracy is often the metric that decides whether customers reorder or disappear, and it is also the metric that drives hidden costs like reships and refunds. Joel Malmquist described how rare it is to hit accuracy at scale, especially on the retail side: "We have over 99.9% ship accuracy of these orders, which when you look at it on a unit level, such as unit shift versus unit errors, I almost couldn't believe it when I came here, how well we're doing on B2B shipping."

Accuracy metrics should be defined in a way that matches how mistakes happen. You want to track units shipped correct, lines shipped correct, and orders shipped correct, because different product mixes create different error patterns. You also want to separate warehouse-caused errors from upstream catalog errors, because that is how you avoid blaming the wrong team and repeating the same problem next month.

Inventory accuracy is the metric that keeps customers from buying ghosts

Inventory accuracy is not glamorous, but it is foundational. If your inventory is wrong, every other metric becomes a lie. Your on-time score may look fine while your backorder rate climbs. Your marketing might celebrate a promotion while the warehouse scrambles to explain why the item is not actually available.

Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10 Fulfillment, described how often inventory accuracy is the reason brands leave another provider. "Most of the customers who come to us from another 3PL, their challenges have always been access to their data, order accuracy and efficiency, and basically just meeting the committed requirements." Later, she tied G10 performance to a concrete number. "Our inventory accuracy is generally right there at that 99.7% that we agreed." When a 3PL can name the number and show the evidence behind it, inventory stops being a mystery and becomes a managed system.

Cycle time metrics show whether you are built for same-day expectations

Customers have been trained by marketplaces to expect fast. That does not mean you need to chase every extreme promise. It does mean you need to understand your own cycle time and how it changes under load. Cycle time is the elapsed time from order release to pick completion, pack completion, and ready-to-ship status. It is the metric that turns "same day" from wishful thinking into an operational commitment.

Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10 Fulfillment, described a common pain point he hears from brands burned elsewhere. "I hear nowadays a lot of people want to offer you know same-day fulfillment for customers who place orders before specific times, which is something we do. But then I hear a customer say, 'A previous 3PL took three days from when the order was placed to when they would ship it.'" Cycle time metrics are how you catch that drift early and correct it before it becomes normal.

Carrier handoff metrics prevent a fake sense of success

One of the most frustrating SLA fights is the argument over whether an order "shipped." In many systems, the order is marked complete when the label prints, but the carrier scan might not happen until later. Customers do not care that the label exists. They care that the package is moving.

Malmquist explained the nuance in a way that should shape how you measure performance. "The reason I don't say ship is because sometimes it will be marked as completed, but the carrier doesn't actually pick it up right away, but the tracking goes back to Shopify." A modern SLA metric set should include both timestamps: warehouse completion and carrier acceptance. When you track both, you can separate a warehouse bottleneck from a carrier bottleneck and manage the right problem.

B2B compliance metrics keep retailers from treating you like an ATM

D2C metrics are often about speed and accuracy. B2B metrics add compliance, which is where the fines live. If you ship to big-box retailers, you are judged on labeling placement, routing guides, pallet rules, and EDI or ASN timing. A fulfillment SLA metric set that ignores those steps is incomplete, even if on-time shipping looks good.

Bryan Wright, CTO and COO of G10 Fulfillment, described why B2B requirements must be built into the system, not handled as manual heroics. "Our WMS system was written from day one around B2B, which is very different." He also described what retailers demand. "They have routing guides that make you specific labels on and put them in a specific place on the box, and you have to send EDI, ASN, electronic information in a timely fashion." Compliance metrics should track those events as pass or fail signals, with exceptions logged clearly, because that is how you prevent chargebacks instead of counting them later.

Why scan-based data is the foundation of credible SLA metrics

Metrics are only as honest as the data that feeds them. In a warehouse, the most reliable source of truth is scanning, because it records physical events in real time. When processes rely on paper, memory, or manual updates, SLA metrics become arguable, and arguable metrics are not metrics.

Wright explained what good tracking looks like inside a warehouse when the system is designed for it. "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." He gave a simple example of why that matters. "At any point in time, I know that Bobby has this product on fork 10 right now, and if I needed to go find that product, I just got to go find Bobby on fork 10." That kind of traceability makes SLA metrics actionable because the moment a number slips, you can see where it slipped.

How visibility changes the customer experience of metrics

Even great metrics can feel useless if customers cannot access them quickly. When a brand has to email for updates, the delay becomes part of the problem. Customers want to see progress, not just receive a summary after the day is over.

Milligan described what real-time portals change for customers. "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." She also explained that the customer can follow fulfillment stages directly. "They can actually watch those progressions going on." That visibility matters because it reduces the telephone tag that burns time on both sides, and it lets the brand answer its own customers without waiting.

Perkins described the same idea from the reporting side. "Our clients get best-in-class visibility and transparency. They can see their daily orders, they can see KPIs, and they can see historical transactions." When SLA metrics live in a portal that is easy to use, they stop being quarterly review material and start being daily steering wheels.

Where G10 fits if you want SLA metrics that drive action

Fulfillment SLA metrics should do two jobs at once. They should prove performance, and they should reveal where performance is about to slip. G10 focuses on scan-based execution, customer-facing visibility, and metrics that align with the real clocks of receiving, D2C cutoffs, and B2B compliance. When the data is clear, the conversation shifts from blame to improvement.

If you want to see what a strong SLA metric set looks like for your specific mix of D2C and B2B, ask for a walkthrough of the daily view and the drill-down view. You should be able to start with a headline metric, then trace a single order or PO end-to-end without guesswork, so you can spend less time worrying about fulfillment and more time growing the business.