Most companies track availability the way they track office plants: someone waters it occasionally and everyone assumes it is fine. Then growth stalls, marketing costs climb, retention softens, and the diagnosis hunt begins everywhere except the shelf.
Availability is revenue. Not "supports revenue," not "influences revenue." When the product is not there, the revenue is not there, and every euro spent bringing the customer to an empty slot is inefficiency you paid for in advance.
Weighted availability gives greater importance to products with higher demand or business impact. It answers the question customers are implicitly asking: were the products people actually want available? Improving it means prioritizing the items whose absence creates the greatest lost sales and dissatisfaction, instead of celebrating a high average carried by slow movers nobody missed.
Binary availability ignores sales weight: is each product available, yes or no? It exposes assortment gaps, repeated stockouts on the long tail, and the consistency of your operation. Weighted tells you how bad the pain is. Binary tells you how widespread it is. You need both, because a strong weighted number can coexist with a decaying assortment.
Stock accuracy measures whether system inventory matches physical inventory. It is the silent killer of the other metrics: a product can look available in the system while the shelf is empty, or look out of stock while units sit in the back room. Every replenishment decision built on inaccurate stock is a coin flip wearing a spreadsheet.
Vendor service level measures whether suppliers deliver what was ordered, and OTIF adds the time dimension. These separate supplier-side failures from internal execution, which is the difference between fixing the right problem and having the same meeting monthly.
Together the four form an attribution chain: weighted availability shows the customer impact, binary shows the spread, stock accuracy shows whether you can trust your own data, and supplier metrics show where the loss enters the chain.
Do not copy anyone's KPI model, including this one, blindly. The real work is deciding which products matter most for your business, where sales are being lost, which problems come from suppliers versus internal processes, and which alerts deserve immediate action. Answer those questions, wire the four numbers to daily decisions, and availability stops being a report and starts being a growth channel.
Decide which products matter most for your business, then wire weighted availability, binary availability, stock accuracy and supplier service level to daily decisions.
The Cash Scan turns your own data into four documents in seven days: where your working capital is sitting, which SKUs are costing you sales, and your planned media budget translated into required units by week. $1,500, credited in full against the Sprint, and findings in seven days or you do not pay.
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