Supply Chain SLA Metrics

When SLAs live in silos, the supply chain pays the price

Supply chain problems love gaps. When inbound, warehousing, and shipping teams measure different things, with different definitions, the gaps turn into late shipments, stockouts, chargebacks, and customer frustration. The numbers can all look fine in their own little neighborhoods while the overall supply chain performance slips. Supply chain SLA metrics exist to stop that. They connect the chain into one set of measurable milestones, so the business can see where time and risk actually live.

Brands usually start caring about supply chain SLA metrics when they scale. Volume increases, channels multiply, and small misses become expensive. A late inbound appointment can ripple into missed D2C cutoffs. A delayed carrier pickup can turn a "shipped" order into a tracking black hole. A single B2B compliance miss can trigger a retailer penalty that wipes out margin on an entire PO. Without shared metrics, each team blames the next one downstream, and nothing gets fixed.

What supply chain SLA metrics should cover in a fulfillment-led model

Supply chain SLA metrics should map to the actual flow of product: inbound receiving, putaway, inventory availability, outbound processing, carrier handoff, and in B2B, compliance milestones. Joel Malmquist, VP of Customer Experience at G10 Fulfillment, described the scope in a sentence that should shape every SLA dashboard. "An SLA is a Service Level Agreements for Receiving, Outbound, and B2B." That scope is a supply chain scope because it spans the steps that determine whether product becomes sellable and shippable on time.

In practice, that means measuring the time from dock to pickable inventory, the time from order release to ready-to-ship, the time from completion to carrier acceptance, and for B2B, the time and correctness of compliance events like labels and EDI. When those milestones are measured together, the business stops guessing and starts improving the right constraint.

Why definitions matter more than the metric list

Supply chain SLA metrics fail when the words in the SLA mean different things to different people. Shipped is the classic trap. Many operations treat shipped as the moment an order is completed internally. Customers treat shipped as carrier acceptance and tracking movement. Retailers treat shipped as compliant, routed, and documented on time. If your SLA metric uses shipped without defining it, you will be arguing about vocabulary instead of preventing misses.

Malmquist explained why he avoids that ambiguity. "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 supply chain SLA metric set should therefore include separate milestones for warehouse completion and carrier acceptance, plus the gap between them. That gap is where dock congestion and missed pickups hide, and it is also where customer experience can fall apart even if the warehouse "hit the SLA" internally.

Receiving SLA metrics: the upstream clocks that control everything else

Receiving is the start of the chain, and it is often the source of downstream surprises. If inbound inventory sits unprocessed, it is not really available, even if it is physically in the building. That creates missed ship windows, oversells, and backorders that feel like outbound failures, even when outbound teams are doing their jobs.

Malmquist described receiving SLAs in clock-based terms that translate directly to metrics. "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." A receiving SLA metric set should include age on dock, count completion time, stow completion time, and exception rates. Those numbers are leading indicators. They tell you whether the outbound team will have pickable inventory tomorrow.

Inventory availability metrics: the bridge between inbound and outbound

Receiving is not done when cartons are counted. It is done when inventory is stowed in a pickable location and the system reflects reality. Supply chain SLA metrics should therefore include inventory availability timing: how quickly inbound inventory becomes available to sell and ship, and how accurate the available-to-promise signal remains during daily operations.

Brands feel inventory availability failures as oversells and backorders. Retail teams feel them as missed ship windows. Customer support feels them as angry emails. This is why inventory accuracy and availability timing belong in the SLA set, not as afterthoughts. They are the bridge metrics that connect what is physically in the building to what the business promises online.

Outbound SLA metrics: cutoffs, cycle time, and the reality of flow

Outbound SLA metrics need to reflect the promises customers actually experience. In D2C, that often means a same-day cutoff. Malmquist described a common commitment clearly. "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 supply chain terms, that SLA only holds if inbound is stable, inventory is accurate, pick and pack flow is smooth, and carrier pickups are reliable.

Outbound metrics should therefore include cutoff compliance, order aging by stage, and cycle time by stage. Cycle time is especially useful because it reveals which stage is drifting before on-time shipping collapses. Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10 Fulfillment, described the contrast brands experience 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 supply chain SLA dashboard that shows cycle time by stage makes that drift visible early, when the operation can still intervene.

Accuracy metrics: the SLA you feel in reverse logistics

Speed is easy to celebrate. Accuracy is what protects margin. A wrong order shipped on time is still a failure because it creates a delayed correct outcome. It also creates reverse logistics work: returns, reships, inventory reconciliation, and customer credits. That is why accuracy belongs inside supply chain SLA metrics, not outside them.

Malmquist described accuracy at a level that is hard to hit without disciplined scanning and verification. "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." The reporting lesson is that accuracy should be measured at order, line, and unit levels. Unit-level accuracy is especially important in B2B, where a tiny error rate can still mean many incorrect units.

B2B SLA metrics: compliance milestones that retailers enforce

B2B supply chain SLAs do not stop at moving product out the door. Retailers enforce compliance: routing guides, labeling rules, pallet builds, and EDI timelines. If those requirements are not met, the retailer can issue chargebacks or cancel orders. That turns compliance into a supply chain SLA issue, not just a documentation task.

Bryan Wright, CTO and COO of G10 Fulfillment, described why B2B must be built into the system. "Our WMS system was written from day one around B2B, which is very different." He described the compliance requirements that supply chain SLAs need to measure. "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." B2B SLA metrics should therefore include label pass rates, ASN timeliness, routing guide compliance, and retailer acceptance outcomes.

Why strict retailer deadlines make delivery windows part of the SLA story

Retailers often have firm delivery deadlines, and they do not accept excuses. That makes delivery timing part of the supply chain SLA discussion, even if the carrier is involved. Holly Woods, Director of Operations at G10 Fulfillment, described the reality of retailer windows. "Target has a deadline for delivery and that's it, no exceptions. They'll just cancel the order." If the retailer can cancel, a late delivery is not a customer experience issue only. It is a revenue loss issue.

Woods also described how compressed timelines can get when inbound arrives late. "When it came in, it had to be completed, received, shipped, labeled, ready for routing to a carrier by that next morning." Supply chain SLA metrics help you identify these compressed scenarios early, so you can prioritize the work that keeps the order alive. Without those metrics, you find out the order was lost after it is too late to save it.

Why scan-based data is the foundation of credible supply chain metrics

SLA metrics are only useful if everyone trusts the timestamps. In a warehouse, the most trustworthy timestamps come from scan events because scans record physical reality. Manual updates create drift, and drift creates arguments. Supply chain teams do not need more arguments. They need faster answers.

Wright described what strong tracking looks like. "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." He explained the operational advantage 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." Scan-based events allow you to drill from a metric to the underlying transaction trail, which is how you fix root causes instead of trading opinions.

Why visibility turns supply chain SLA metrics into prevention

Even the best SLA metrics are useless if you only see them after the week ends. The supply chain needs visibility during the day, while you can still adjust labor, prioritize exceptions, and protect cutoffs. That is where real-time portals change behavior.

Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10 Fulfillment, described the value of customer-facing visibility. "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." She added a simple description of what that means. "They can actually watch those progressions going on." Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10 Fulfillment, described what customers can see when visibility is built correctly. "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 customers and internal teams can see the same progressions, supply chain SLA metrics become a prevention tool, not a post-mortem.

Where G10 fits if you want SLA metrics that connect the whole chain

Supply chain SLA metrics should connect inbound, warehouse execution, carrier handoff, and B2B compliance into one measurable system. G10 focuses on scan-based execution and customer-facing visibility built on ChannelPoint WMS, so the metrics match what is happening on the floor. As Malmquist said, "An SLA is a Service Level Agreements for Receiving, Outbound, and B2B." That scope guides how performance is measured and improved.

If you want to see what supply chain SLA metrics look like when they are actually usable, ask for a walkthrough of a live day in the portal, including one exception case. You should be able to trace a KPI to the underlying transactions, see where time and risk live, and adjust your process before the next SLA miss becomes a cost you cannot ignore.