Your customers can see your OTIF. Your team is guessing at it.
We build the analytics platforms that give Michiana manufacturers real OTIF visibility. The kind their team actually uses every shift. Built on the tools you already pay for. Designed for the way your plant already works.
Book a Briefing CallYou saw the misses coming?
That's what an OTIF visibility layer does. It surfaces at-risk orders before they ship. It catches issues while they're still small, before they become systemic. It puts the data in front of your team while there's still time to fix what's breaking, not weeks later when a customer raises it, or months later when they stop calling. That's the build we do for Michiana manufacturers.
Missed deliveries cost more than you think.
The real cost isn't the deduction or the expedited freight invoice. It's the customer relationship that's quietly cooling before anyone notices. It's the next program that goes to your competitor without you ever being told why. It's the customer who used to call you first that doesn't anymore.
Most owners aren't sitting down to add it up because they're running the business. Nobody in the building is doing it for them.
Reliability is the new sales pitch.
Your biggest customers are consolidating their supplier base. They're keeping the ones who can prove they deliver. They're dropping the ones who can't. For most Michiana manufacturers, that means a few customers will make or break the next year. Lose one of them and the rest of the year changes shape. The shops who can show, with data, that they deliver reliably are the ones who keep getting the call when programs reshore, when volumes shift, and when new RFQs go out.
What missed deliveries actually cost.
Walmart's OTIF program is the canonical example: 3% of item value pulled when a shipment arrives late, short, or out of spec. Target's Perfect Order Program layers ASN availability and barcode penalties on top. For retail-facing manufacturers, industry estimates put 3 to 8 percent of annual sales in deduction recovery loops. For everyone else, the penalty is less mechanical and just as expensive: lost allocation, lost RFQs, and a customer scorecard you can't argue with.
Customers with formal supplier scorecards categorize you as strategic, qualified, or backup. The drop from strategic to backup typically takes 20 to 40 percent of your volume off the table within one or two program cycles. You don't see it as a deduction. You see it as the order that never came in.
When an order is going to miss, you have two choices. Take the chargeback or pay 2 to 3 times normal freight rates to catch up. Either way the margin on that order is gone. Most operations teams quietly burn through more in expedited freight per year than they pay in the chargebacks they were trying to avoid.
Industry research consistently puts the cost of acquiring a new B2B customer at five to seven times the cost of retaining one. When OTIF erodes a customer relationship to the point they leave, you're not just losing the revenue. You're paying five to seven times the price of keeping them to win a replacement, and you're paying it against a competitor your former customer just validated by walking.
We build the analytics platforms that improve your OTIF.
Using the tools you already pay for. Designed for the way your team already works. We start with OTIF visibility, because that's where your customers are watching first.
OTIF Visibility Build
We audit your order-to-ship process and build the analytics platform that shows your team exactly which orders are at risk, where promise dates are slipping, and why. Built on Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or whatever your team already knows.
Visibility Builds
Same approach as the OTIF Visibility Build, applied to your next operational area. Inventory, Supply, Quality, Maintenance, Demand, or Logistics. Scoped to what's costing you most.
Monthly Watch
Senior-level analytics oversight at about a quarter of what an in-house analyst would cost. We keep your dashboards online, fix issues fast, and keep them relevant as your business changes.
Fixed scope. Fixed price. No theater.
Every engagement starts with a 30-minute Briefing Call. No prep, no sales pitch, just a conversation about what's happening in your plant and where your delivery performance is slipping. If we move forward, the work has a fixed price and a fixed timeline. The deliverable is something tangible you own and can act on. We do the work. Your team gets the visibility.
What it looks like when somebody actually builds the visibility.
At a large manufacturer where delivery metrics were central to every customer relationship, the team had been managing OTIF the way most teams do, chasing exceptions after they landed, reacting to customer escalations, and rebuilding spreadsheets to figure out which orders had missed and why.
We built the visibility layer that had been scattered across systems. One place to see every order, whether it was on time or late, with the customer, material, and location information that actually mattered. It was designed in conjunction with their leadership team so it worked the way their plant already worked.
Delivery performance improved 3 to 5 percent month over month once the visibility went live. Not because the team worked harder. Because they could finally see when issues started to occur instead of finding out three weeks later from a customer escalation. The team identified easy wins that got product out the door faster. They started having proactive conversations with carriers about lanes and appointment windows that were slipping, instead of reactive ones after a customer flagged the miss.
For the first time, customer conversations started with their data, not the customer's. The sales team had something they wanted to show instead of explain. The team stopped feeling a quarter behind their own business.
Stephen Gnidovec
Founder, Great Lakes Analytics
Great Lakes Analytics exists to close the gap between data investments and the decisions they were supposed to enable. The methodology behind every build is what Stephen developed running this work directly inside multi-plant operations, not from a consulting playbook.
He is the author of The Data Culture Handbook and teaches data analytics at Elmhurst University and Southern New Hampshire University.
The methodology lives in a book.
The Data Culture Handbook documents the frameworks every engagement runs on. Read it before a Briefing Call if you want to know what you're walking into. Read it after if you want to apply what we delivered.
Your customers are tracking your delivery performance. Catch it before they do.
Book a 30-minute Briefing Call. Tell us what's happening in your plant and where your OTIF is slipping. Walk away with a working hypothesis on where the leaks probably are and what a Build would scope.
Book a Briefing Call