It is really important to us that Labels are delivered to our customers as they expect – Right First Time… On Time.

This post publishes data for the first time on how we do this, what we measure, and why we continue to set the Lead time standards in the UK label industry.

OTIF is key – but does it tell the complete picture?

Satisfied customers are the best measure of business performance and a great source of new customers – word of mouth recommendations really matter. But how do you select a key supplier to manufacture your labels when delivery performance matters to you?

Well in the manufacturing sector we measure delivery performance with a metric called Otif – the % of orders that are delivered On Time In Full, and periodically publish our numbers so customers can see that we ‘walk the walk’ as well as ‘talk the talk’.

So, how are we doing in respect of delivering labels On Time in Full?  This is our track record in the last couple of years across all jobs – custom Digital labels (the toughest profile to deliver on – see below), long run flexo labels, variable barcode labels, Label Lock, Gammatex, digital cartons – everything we manufacture:

Not a bad track record if we say so ourselves with nearly 98% of jobs leaving  us on time in full last month, and we continue to improve.  Doing this performance with over 21,000 different custom labels a year (2015 data) is a real challenge.  The 2% includes orders that leave 1 minute or more past their promised time/date slot date when the order is taken, or only part of the order is delivered before the original promised date (and yes, we are strict on our measurements!)

However OTIF alone doesn’t tell the complete picture…

You see OTIF measures success against the promised delivery date, and the obvious way of ensuring a company can report high OTIF is to push out your promised delivery times like a lot of our competitors do.  This is because its a LOT easier to hit a custom printed label job delivery date in 5 days than it is in 3 days of course, as there are 2 days extra to fix any unexpected problems, machine breakdowns, quality failures, supplier under-performance etc.  So when Lead Times get shorter, maintaining and ultimately improving OTIF gets very tough.  But we like a challenge and throughout 2015 our operations teams have been working very hard lean manufacturing techniques, IT investments, staff training and Standard Operating Procedures to improve OTIF and lead times as customer requirements expectations continue to evolve.

Delivery speeds matter, and they are getting shorter

So, as well as OTIF we now also measure against the leads time we offer.

This is a key metric of what sets Mercian Labels apart from our competitors – its the ‘speed’ in our moto of ‘Speed and Service’.

Here are some comparative lead times for custom printed labels from artwork approval to dispatch (working days); again these are across multiple production types including hotfoil, digital, flexo and multi processes.

Looking back on 15 years of being in the label business, I recall that we were known to be a quick supplier in 2001 with a 3 week year time.  By 2005 that was closer to 1 week, and by 2008 a routine lead time of 3 days without attracting an urgent delivery price premium was normally judged by the marketplace to be unusually good.  Then the recession came and Finance Directors across the entire economy pushed for destocking, reduced inventory, less obsolete stock and quicker lead times.  Our lead times therefore had to improve further to support our customers.

With our focus and investment in digital technology and critically the people and processes to support that business model, the volume of business we handle has exploded as customers integrated the advantages of digital production in particular into their value chains, now ordering just-in-time, with ever increasing complexity of order profiles, roll sizes, designs and quality expectations.

Consequently our delivery times have improved as the data shows.  By 2014 roughly half of all orders were leaving us the next day.  By January 2016 this increased to 70% – a very high standard when judged against any benchmark we have seen from any supplier anywhere in the world.

Digital is now the fastest its ever been

However the greatest proportion of jobs we do are straightforward digital jobs done on our Xeikon 3300 and Xeikon CX3 Cheetah digital machines, and the data for this, the largest profile of jobs we do is even more impressive:

As you can see, delivery times for digital only jobs are particularly quick, but the profile is “spiky” as we say internally, and the lead times change from day to day as a result of the orders placed by any of the thousands of businesses who use us for their label requirements.

Obviously we accommodate an awful lot of urgent jobs for customers, but with such a complex profile of business now being placed in 2016, a simple & universal guarantee to everyone of delivery in ‘X’ number of days for all orders is no longer appropriate.  We work with customers now to plan our production scheduling every hour of every working day to meet the expectations of all our customers, and we are getting very good at it thanks to the work of our Operational & IT teams.

As ever the marketplace will dictate where the next development is needed, but in terms of lead times we believe we are doing rather well now.

We have further exciting developments in our service to announce soon – watch this space!

Thanks to the award winning team who made this possible!

Tempted to give us a try?

If you want to try us out, then please get in contact by email to [email protected] or call 01543 431070.