SLA Breach Reporting

When an SLA breach is discovered late, you pay twice

An SLA breach is not just a missed metric. It is a missed promise, and missed promises have a habit of multiplying. The first cost is obvious, such as a late order, a refund, or a retailer penalty. The second cost is quieter: the hours spent arguing about what happened, chasing data, and trying to prevent a repeat without knowing the real cause. SLA breach reporting exists to stop that second cost from becoming your normal.

Brands often learn this the hard way. A 3PL says performance is fine because orders were completed internally. Customers say performance is not fine because tracking did not move, or because delivery was late. Retailers say performance is not fine because labels were wrong or ASNs were late. Without clear breach reporting, every miss becomes a debate about definitions instead of an operational fix.

What an SLA breach actually is in fulfillment terms

An SLA breach is a failure to meet a defined commitment within a defined window, using defined timestamps. That sounds obvious until you see how many SLAs are written with fuzzy words like shipped, fast, or on time. If the SLA definition is fuzzy, breach reporting becomes a guessing game.

Joel Malmquist, VP of Customer Experience at G10 Fulfillment, described the scope that should be covered by SLA measurement. "An SLA is a Service Level Agreements for Receiving, Outbound, and B2B." That is important because breach reporting needs to follow the whole chain. If you only report outbound breaches, you can miss the receiving delays that created them. If you ignore B2B compliance milestones, you can claim success while retailers issue chargebacks anyway.

Why the word "shipped" is the fastest way to start a breach argument

Many breach disputes begin with one word: shipped. A warehouse might count shipped as label printed or order completed. Customers usually count shipped as the carrier accepting the package and tracking moving. Retailers often count shipped as compliant, routed, and documented on time. If your breach report uses shipped without clarifying which event it means, your report will be attacked before it is read.

Malmquist explained the gap that causes this confusion. "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." This is why breach reporting should include two milestones, warehouse completion and carrier acceptance, then classify the breach based on which milestone was missed. If completion was late, that is an internal flow issue. If acceptance was late, that can be a dock workflow or pickup schedule issue. If acceptance was on time but delivery was late, that can be a carrier transit issue.

Cutoffs turn breach reporting into something you can use daily

Most SLAs in D2C are built around cutoffs. A cutoff defines which orders must move today and which can move tomorrow. Without cutoffs, the warehouse is always behind because the goalpost never stops moving. With cutoffs, breach reporting becomes a daily control system.

Malmquist described the cutoff logic that customers expect in modern D2C. "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." In breach reporting terms, that means you need a report that shows which orders qualified for the cutoff, which met warehouse completion, which met carrier acceptance, and which missed, plus the reason codes that explain the misses. This is how a promise becomes measurable and improvable.

Receiving breaches are the upstream failures that make outbound look guilty

Receiving is the start of the fulfillment pipeline, and it is often the source of downstream breaches. If inventory is on the dock but not counted and stowed, outbound cannot pick it, even if the product is physically present. The result can look like an outbound SLA breach when the real cause is receiving throughput or exception handling.

Malmquist described receiving SLAs in clock-based terms that belong in a breach report. "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." Receiving breach reporting should therefore include age on dock, count completion time, stow completion time, and exception categories, because those metrics predict whether tomorrow will be clean or chaotic.

Outbound breaches should be classified by stage, not lumped into one pile

An outbound breach is usually not "the warehouse was late." It is often "picking started late," or "packing became the bottleneck," or "exceptions were not resolved quickly enough." If breach reporting does not classify by stage, the fix becomes guesswork, and teams tend to respond with end-of-day heroics that do not prevent the next breach.

This is where cycle time becomes useful. When you measure pick cycle time, pack cycle time, and staging time, you can see which stage drifted. Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10 Fulfillment, described what brands report 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.'" A breach report that includes cycle time by stage makes that drift visible early, which is how you prevent the same miss from repeating.

Accuracy breaches are breaches, even when the shipment left on time

A shipment can leave on time and still violate the spirit of the SLA if it is wrong. Wrong SKU, wrong quantity, missing inserts, or damaged product all create the same outcome: the customer does not receive what they bought when they expected it. In many businesses, the cost of a wrong order is higher than the cost of a late order because it triggers reships and returns.

Joel Malmquist described the accuracy level that prevents this kind of hidden breach. "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." Breach reporting should include accuracy breaches as their own category, because the fix is different. Accuracy breaches often point to scan discipline, slotting, or verification steps that are not being enforced consistently.

B2B breach reporting must treat compliance as a measurable timeline

B2B SLAs are not only about speed. They are also about compliance, and compliance comes with penalties. A PO can be picked and packed on time and still breach a retailer SLA if labels are wrong, routing guides are ignored, or EDI events are late. This is why B2B breach reporting must include compliance milestones as pass or fail events with timestamps.

Bryan Wright, CTO and COO of G10 Fulfillment, explained why this needs to be built into the system. "Our WMS system was written from day one around B2B, which is very different." He described the compliance steps 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 breach reporting includes those milestones, you can spot repeat failure patterns, such as one retailer routing guide being misapplied, or one ASN transmission step being delayed at peak.

Why strict retailer deadlines make breach reporting feel like revenue protection

Retailers do not reward effort. They reward compliance. Holly Woods, Director of Operations at G10 Fulfillment, described the reality brands face when they ship into major retail networks. "Target has a deadline for delivery and that's it, no exceptions. They'll just cancel the order." In that environment, a breach report is not a vanity dashboard. It is an early warning system that helps you keep orders alive.

Woods also described how compressed timelines can get when inbound timing is imperfect. "When it came in, it had to be completed, received, shipped, labeled, ready for routing to a carrier by that next morning." A breach report that highlights those compressed windows, and the stage where time is being lost, helps teams prioritize work that prevents cancellations instead of cleaning up after them.

Why scan-based data is what makes breach reporting defensible

Breach reporting is only as credible as the timestamps behind it. In a warehouse, the most credible timestamps come from scan events, because scans record physical reality. Manual updates create timing drift, and timing drift turns breach reporting into a debate.

Wright described the foundation of credible tracking. "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." He explained the operational benefit of that traceability. "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." When breach reporting is built from scan events, you can drill from a KPI into the transaction trail and see exactly where the miss started, which is how you fix the process instead of trading opinions.

Why visibility changes breach reporting from a report into a prevention tool

If you learn about breaches after the week ends, you are too late to prevent them. The goal is to see risk during the day, while you can still reassign labor, resolve exceptions, and protect cutoffs. That requires real-time visibility into order stages and queues.

Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10 Fulfillment, described what real-time portals provide customers. "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." She also described the practical benefit of that visibility. "They can actually watch those progressions going on." When customers and account teams can see the same progressions, breach reporting becomes proactive. Teams can intervene before the breach happens, and communication becomes calmer because everyone is looking at the same truth.

Where G10 fits if you need breach reporting that actually reduces breaches

SLA breach reporting should do three things: define the promise clearly, measure it honestly, and make it easier to prevent the next miss. G10 focuses on scan-based execution, SLA-aligned workflows across receiving, outbound, and B2B compliance, plus customer-facing visibility designed to show where time is being spent. The goal is fewer surprises and faster fixes, because breaches are expensive when they repeat.

If you want to see how SLA breach reporting works in practice, ask for a walkthrough of a live day in the portal that includes cutoff compliance, receiving timelines, carrier acceptance gaps, and one real exception case. You should be able to trace the breach to a specific stage and a specific set of events, so you can grow without letting SLAs turn into a monthly argument.