Vendor scorecards, explained

OTIF, on time in full, measures whether a delivery arrived in the agreed window and complete. Both halves matter: early is a failure as often as late, because receiving capacity is planned. SQEP extends the idea to packaging, labeling, barcodes and documentation, scoring whether the shipment can be processed without manual intervention. Perfect Order programs combine similar elements under one composite score.

The common thread is that all of them measure the shipment as a process, not the merchandise as a product. A supplier can send perfect goods and fail on every metric.

Below a threshold, deductions apply per occurrence or as a percentage of the cost of the affected goods, and they are netted from payment rather than invoiced. That mechanism is described in the chargebacks guide. Because the deduction is automatic, the supplier's only lever is the dispute process and its deadline.

Three things work: reconcile every remittance against expectations rather than accepting the net, keep the document set for every shipment in a form that can be produced in minutes, and track failures by code to see whether the root cause is internal or is the retailer's own receiving process. The third is the one suppliers skip, and it is the one that identifies systematic error.