Improving Availability in a q-Commerce FMCG Environment

How a q-commerce operation stopped debating availability and started attributing it

The Challenge

In q-commerce, the customer does not see the complexity behind an unavailable product. They do not see whether the cause was an inaccurate forecast, a supplier delivery failure, incorrect receiving, inventory inaccuracy, a replenishment delay, poor master data, an incorrect product status, a shelf-life restriction, or stock sitting in the wrong fulfillment point.

The customer only sees that the product is unavailable.

Internally, that produced the worst kind of meeting: nine possible causes, no attribution, and a room full of people each confident it was one of the other eight. Availability was discussed constantly and improved slowly, because nothing was owned.

The Solution

We built the measurement layer that made attribution possible, across a large digital assortment, multiple fulfillment locations and hundreds of suppliers.

Six KPIs, each with a precise definition and an owner:

• Weighted availability: gives greater importance to products with higher customer demand or business impact, so improvement effort goes where absence creates the greatest lost sales
• Binary availability: whether each product is available or not, regardless of sales weight, exposing assortment gaps and repeated stockouts
• Vendor service level: how reliably suppliers deliver the products and quantities ordered, separating supplier failures from internal execution
• OTIF: on time in full, as one combined result rather than two separate excuses
• Stock accuracy: whether system inventory matches physical inventory, because a product can look available while the shelf is empty, and the reverse
• Shrink and shelf-life compliance: products lost to expiry, damage, poor rotation, or unsuitable supplier deliveries

The Results

Key results

• Availability went from 84 percent to 96 percent
• Every lost day of availability now gets a cause and an owner instead of a debate
• Supplier failures cleanly separated from internal execution problems
• Improvement effort directed by revenue impact, via weighted availability, rather than by whoever complained most recently

What you can apply

Do not try to improve availability before you can attribute it. A single availability percentage with nine possible causes behind it is not a metric, it is a topic. The strength of the model is attribution, not measurement.

About this project

• Service: KPI architecture and availability control
• Industry: q-commerce and FMCG
• Scale: Large digital assortment, multiple fulfillment locations, hundreds of suppliers
• Duration: Ongoing engagement

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