What Is On-Time Delivery Rate (OTD)?

On-time delivery rate, or OTD, is the percentage of jobs completed on or before their due date. If 47 of 50 orders shipped on time, the OTD rate is 94 percent. It is one of the headline indicators of a plant's reliability, because it measures how well the shop keeps the promises it makes to customers.

EDGEBIC by User Solutions computes on-time delivery from the schedule and reports it on the dashboard. This article defines the metric and shows how the plan protects it.

How It Works

OTD is a simple ratio: the count of jobs that finished on or before their due date, divided by the total count of jobs, expressed as a percentage. What makes it meaningful is measuring each job against the right date. A job is on time only if it is delivery-ready by its due date, and delivery-ready is not always the moment the part comes off the last machine.

Many products carry a tail after the final operation: paint that cures, parts that ship to a customer, an item that needs a day of rest. That tail is real lead time that must land before the due date. Measuring lateness against the delivery-ready date, which is the schedule finish plus that tail, keeps every surface in agreement about which jobs are late, so the dashboard, the reports, and the customer all see the same answer.

A Concrete Example

Suppose a plant runs 50 orders in a month. Forty-seven of them finish and become delivery-ready on or before their promised dates. Three slip past. The OTD rate is 47 divided by 50, or 94 percent.

Now look at why the three slipped. In almost every case the cause is not a genuine shortage of machine hours; it is idle time in the wrong place. A long operation blocks a shared machine while a job that should have fed the next station waits, and that job finishes late. Reorder the sequence so the short feeding job goes first, and the late job often lands on time instead, which nudges OTD up without adding a minute of capacity.

How EDGEBIC Uses It

On-time delivery appears on the dashboard as a headline KPI, computed by classifying every job against its delivery-ready date. Jobs whose plan already misses the due date are flagged distinctly from jobs whose plan is fine but the calendar has already run past, so a planner can tell a scheduling problem from a simply-overdue one at a glance.

The schedule protects OTD in two ways. First, the default optimizer goal is on-time first, which ranks weighted tardiness ahead of every other objective, so the engine favors sequences that keep priority orders on their dates. Second, flagging a bottleneck work center turns on anchor scheduling with protective buffers, which stops one late feeder from cascading into a run of missed dates.

On-time delivery is the customer-facing outcome; schedule adherence is the process discipline behind it. The manufacturing glossary covers the related delivery and performance terms, and what is production scheduling explains how a finite-capacity plan turns due dates into a plan you can actually hit.