For a mid-market packaged food manufacturer, OTIF is not just a KPI: it drives retail scorecards, chargebacks, slotting fee protection, promotion execution, cash flow, and customer retention. Retail targets are typically 95–98% or higher, and even a 3–5% drop can mean lost shelf space, fines, expedited freight, and spoilage risk.
The guide names what actually hurts OTIF in food — promotion spikes forecast in Excel, shelf-life limits on buffer inventory, dedicated lines with allergen changeovers, ingredient volatility, and manual order promising — and the practices that work: separating baseline from promotion forecasting, constrained supply planning, service-level-driven safety stock, real-time available-to-promise, and exception-based management.
It then maps those practices to SAP. SAP Integrated Business Planning prevents OTIF failures in planning with promotion-driven demand planning, multi-echelon inventory optimization that respects shelf life, constrained supply planning around real line capacity, and scenario planning. SAP S/4HANA Cloud prevents them in execution with advanced ATP and product allocation, embedded warehouse management with batch and FEFO control, and finite production scheduling. It closes with the financial case for improving OTIF from 90% to 96% and the framing for the VP of Supply Chain, CFO, and CIO.
The full guide is available above as a PDF. See also "SAP Advanced ATP: Real-Time Order Promising to Protect Revenue, Cut Costs, and Improve OTIF" and "Recall Readiness for Food Manufacturing" in the Resource Library.