Late Shipment Root Cause Analysis

When late shipments become a pattern, not an exception

A late shipment is annoying. Repeated late shipments are expensive. They trigger customer complaints, retailer penalties, internal friction, and a slow erosion of confidence that is hard to measure until it is gone. Late shipment root cause analysis exists to stop that slide. It replaces finger pointing with evidence, and it turns one bad day into a learning opportunity instead of a recurring failure.

Most teams know they have a late shipment problem when the same explanations show up again and again. The carrier was late. The order came in too close to cutoff. Inventory was not available. None of those explanations are useful until you can prove them and quantify how often they occur. Root cause analysis is how you move from stories to facts.

Why late shipments are rarely caused by one thing

Late shipments are usually the final symptom of a chain of small delays. Receiving took longer than planned. Inventory was stowed late. Picks queued up behind replenishment. Packing ran out of capacity. A carrier pickup window was missed. By the time the shipment is late, the real cause may be hours or days upstream.

This is why root cause analysis has to look across the full SLA scope. Joel Malmquist, VP of Customer Experience at G10 Fulfillment, described that scope clearly. "An SLA is a Service Level Agreements for Receiving, Outbound, and B2B." If you only analyze outbound, you will miss inbound causes. If you only analyze the warehouse, you will miss carrier handoff causes. Late shipment analysis only works when it follows the entire timeline.

Start with definitions before you start assigning causes

The first step in any analysis is agreeing on what late means. Is a shipment late when it misses warehouse completion? When it misses carrier acceptance? When it misses promised delivery? Different answers lead to different fixes, and mixing them guarantees confusion.

Joel Malmquist explained why the definition of shipped matters so much. "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 good root cause analysis separates warehouse completion time from carrier acceptance time, because a shipment that is completed on time but accepted late has a very different fix than a shipment that never made it out of picking.

How to build a timeline for every late shipment

Root cause analysis works best when every late shipment has a timeline attached to it. That timeline should include order release time, pick start and completion, pack completion, staging time, carrier acceptance, and any exception events. When you line these events up, patterns emerge quickly.

For example, if many late shipments show long gaps between pack completion and carrier acceptance, the issue is likely dock workflow or pickup schedules. If many show long gaps between order release and pick start, the issue may be labor allocation or wave planning. The timeline turns a vague complaint into a specific operational question.

Receiving delays are the upstream cause many teams miss

Receiving is often invisible in late shipment discussions because the order that shipped late was outbound. In reality, inbound delays can quietly starve outbound. Inventory can be physically present and still unavailable to pick if it has not been counted and stowed.

Malmquist described receiving SLAs in terms that make this connection clear. "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." When receiving performance slips, late shipments follow, even if outbound teams are working hard. Root cause analysis should therefore always check receiving timelines before blaming picking or packing.

Cycle time analysis shows where the day is being lost

Fulfillment cycle time measures how long orders spend in each stage. When cycle time grows in one stage, it often predicts late shipments before they happen. That makes cycle time one of the most powerful tools in root cause analysis.

Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10 Fulfillment, described the frustration brands feel when cycle time is poorly controlled. "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.'" That gap is cycle time drift, and analyzing where that drift occurs is how you prevent the next late shipment.

Accuracy issues create hidden late shipments

Some late shipments are not late on paper. They are late because they shipped wrong. A wrong item shipped on time still creates a delayed outcome for the customer, because the correct item must be reshipped. Root cause analysis should therefore include error-driven reships as a category of lateness.

Malmquist described the accuracy level that prevents this kind of hidden delay. "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." When accuracy drops, late shipment analysis should look at pick verification, pack verification, and exception handling, because speed without accuracy only postpones the delay.

Carrier handoff gaps separate warehouse issues from carrier issues

One of the most important steps in late shipment root cause analysis is separating warehouse delay from carrier delay. This requires tracking the gap between warehouse completion and carrier acceptance. If that gap is large, the fix is usually internal. If the gap is small and delivery is still late, the fix may involve carrier selection or service levels.

Holly Woods, Director of Operations at G10 Fulfillment, described how strict carrier and retailer timelines can be. "Target has a deadline for delivery and that's it, no exceptions. They'll just cancel the order." In that environment, knowing exactly when the carrier took possession is critical. Without that timestamp, every late delivery turns into a debate instead of a decision.

Why scan-based data is the backbone of honest analysis

Root cause analysis fails when data is fuzzy. Scan-based events provide the clean timestamps needed to reconstruct what happened. Manual updates and after-the-fact adjustments create narratives, not evidence.

Bryan Wright, CTO and COO of G10 Fulfillment, described what makes scan-based tracking so powerful. "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." He explained how that traceability works on the floor. "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 level of detail allows teams to trace late shipments to specific process breaks instead of guessing.

Why B2B late shipment analysis must include compliance

In B2B, a shipment can be late even if it leaves on time. Compliance failures, such as incorrect labels or late EDI, can cause a retailer to reject or penalize a shipment, creating a delayed outcome that feels like lateness. Root cause analysis must include these compliance milestones.

Wright described why B2B needs this level of detail. "Our WMS system was written from day one around B2B, which is very different." He described the requirements that must be tracked. "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." If a PO is rejected due to compliance, the root cause is not speed. It is a missed compliance step.

Turning analysis into prevention, not reports

The goal of late shipment root cause analysis is not to create a thicker report. It is to change behavior before the next cutoff. That means looking for patterns, not one-offs, and fixing the process that causes the pattern.

Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10 Fulfillment, described how visibility helps teams act sooner. "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." She explained what that enables. "They can actually watch those progressions going on." When teams can see aging orders and stalled stages during the day, they can intervene before a shipment becomes late, which is the real payoff of analysis.

Where G10 fits if late shipments need to stop repeating

Late shipment root cause analysis only works when the data is trustworthy and the scope is complete. G10 focuses on scan-based execution, SLA-aligned workflows across receiving, outbound, and B2B, plus customer-facing visibility that makes timelines clear. The result is fewer surprises and faster fixes, because the operation can see where time is being lost.

If you want to see how late shipment analysis works in practice, ask for a walkthrough of a real exception case from start to finish. You should be able to trace the order timeline, see exactly where the delay started, and understand how the process was adjusted, so late shipments become rarer instead of becoming your normal.