Real Time Order Accuracy Tracking: Stopping Mistakes Before They Leave The Building

Order accuracy falls apart when nobody is watching in real time

Order accuracy usually fails in small, quiet ways. A picker grabs the wrong variant from a nearby bin. A unit is short picked and nobody notices. A replacement SKU gets used in a rush without a clean update to the system. One or two of these errors can be absorbed. But as volume grows, missing real time order accuracy tracking turns small mistakes into a steady leak of money and trust.

Research shows that brands have raised the bar on what they expect from their fulfillment partners. They do not just want orders to ship. They want proof that orders ship correctly, at scale, every day. Refunds, reships, chargebacks, and unhappy customers are all symptoms of the same underlying problem: the 3PL cannot see its own accuracy clearly enough, fast enough.

Many brands who come to G10 have already experienced how damaging poor accuracy can be. They have watched their support queues fill with complaints about wrong items and missing quantities. They have sat in meetings trying to explain why retailer scorecards dipped. They have wondered whether their 3PL really had the tools to track accuracy in real time, or whether everyone was simply hoping for the best.

As Maureen Milligan said, "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. So we've seen a lot of people come disillusioned by their last 3PL, where their orders weren't getting fulfilled in time, their inventory accuracy was not there, and they were not able to satisfy customer orders." Real time order accuracy tracking exists to prevent exactly this kind of disillusionment.

Real time order accuracy tracking begins with full operational visibility

A fulfillment operation cannot track accuracy in real time unless it tracks work in real time. That means seeing not only when an order ships but how it was built. Real time order accuracy tracking depends on knowing which items were picked, from which locations, by whom, and how those items moved through the building.

Bryan Wright described the kind of detail G10 captures when he said, "Absolutely. We have portals that show you the data. We have history that shows you all of that tracking. It shows the product landed on the dock at 8 o'clock. At 8:10, John picked it up and took it to location XYZ, and at 10 o'clock, we picked two items off of that pellet in the location 1, 2, 3, 4, order, you know, ABC, and at 11 o'clock, we packed it, we put it in this box and put this label number on it, and all the way through the process onto the truck and to the customer." This history is what makes it possible to confirm whether orders were built correctly.

When an operation has this level of traceability, accuracy questions become much easier to answer. Instead of guessing whether an error happened at pick, pack, or receiving, teams can look directly at the event trail. The same data that powers real time tracking also powers real time accuracy checks.

Scan-based workflows keep accuracy tracking honest

Real time order accuracy tracking only works when every meaningful action is scanned. If workers can move product without scanning it, the system cannot reliably say what was picked or where shortages came from. Scan discipline is not just about speed. It is about knowing what really happened.

As Connor Perkins said, "You want everything to be scanned in the warehouse, nothing done on paper. You can lose a lot of money in this industry by you know having people ship stuff wrong, or store it wrong, and now it's lost somewhere. So having a 3PL and WMS that is 100% scan-based is crucial." Real time order accuracy tracking depends on that 100 percent scan-based standard.

Connor also described what goes wrong when accuracy is not managed tightly. He said, "One of the pain points our clients have experienced with previous 3PLSs is inventory accuracy; maybe their previous 3PL wasn't great at picking the orders accurately. So they were losing money by shipping wrong items or wrong quantities of items." Real time order accuracy tracking is how you notice and fix those problems before they become a pattern.

Portals give brands direct insight into accuracy performance

Tracking accuracy in real time is only useful if brands can see the results. A 3PL that measures accuracy but does not share the data is asking customers to trust without verifying. Modern brands expect to see their own performance numbers, including accuracy metrics, inside a live portal.

As Maureen said, "We're in the last stages of developing a new portal that will give customers real-time visibility to their on-time order fulfillment, inventory accuracy, and even inventory levels so that they can monitor those things directly in our systems. They'll have visibility to what the statuses of their orders-are they getting processed as they expect?-and things like that." Real time order accuracy tracking belongs in this visibility layer.

She also said, "A lot of the 3PL customer expectations are that order fulfillment is happening extremely timely, that our inventory is accurate, that we're able to execute on their orders very quickly, and get them shipped the same day. So what these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." That visibility includes seeing whether orders are consistently correct, not just consistently fast.

Connor explained how G10 surfaces this data when he said, "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. They can look at a daily level or go into the more granular version where they're looking at transactional history on an item." Accuracy tracking depends on exactly this kind of transactional history.

He added, "You have easy access to reporting and you can export to Excel, or really any format that you like you know directly from our WMS portal." That makes it possible for brands to pull accuracy data into their own reporting, scorecards, and reviews.

Real time accuracy tracking keeps small errors from turning into big costs

Every wrong item, mis-picked quantity, or missed line has a cost. There is the immediate cost of replacement and shipping. There is the softer cost of a disappointed customer. There is the internal cost of time spent investigating what went wrong. Without real time order accuracy tracking, these costs blend into the background and are accepted as inevitable.

With real time tracking, patterns emerge quickly. Teams can see if certain SKUs are frequently mis-picked, if certain stations have higher error rates, or if certain order profiles tend to generate more exceptions. Leaders can adjust training, rebalance workloads, or change slotting to reduce those issues before they become expensive habits.

As Maureen said, "We will take in your inbounds, we will get them received and reported back to you within our SLAs, and oftentimes more quickly than what we contracted for. We will ship your orders out the day they're required. And our inventory accuracy is generally right there at that 99.7% that we agreed. So that's one of the areas where we really do excel, and where we've been able to win business." Accuracy numbers like that depend on constant awareness of how orders are actually being built.

Accuracy transparency helps repair trust after bad experiences

Brands that have suffered through poor accuracy at a previous 3PL often approach new relationships with low trust. They remember how often they had to ask for investigations. They remember being told that error rates were under control while customers said otherwise. Real time order accuracy tracking offers something those brands did not have before: shared, live proof.

As Maureen said, "For customers who have come to us from a bad 3PL relationship, they experience relief. They're suddenly seeing their business scaling, that the data supports what we agreed to, and then the trust begins to build." When a 3PL can show order accuracy metrics that match the customer experience, that trust grows much faster.

Real time order accuracy tracking is now a basic requirement

Fast-growing brands cannot afford to treat accuracy misses as a cost of doing business. Every error damages reputation, drains margin, and adds friction to growth. Real time order accuracy tracking turns accuracy from a vague target into a measurable, manageable part of daily operations.

As Connor said, "This is one of our strengths. G10 is on the cutting edge for this kind of transparency and feedback for clients." That transparency includes not only how fast orders move but how correct they are when they move.

If you want a fulfillment operation that catches mistakes before they reach your customers, and gives you clear data on how accurately orders are being shipped, real time order accuracy tracking is essential. It is how brands protect their promises while they scale.