Deliver 99.4% of your consumer orders in full, on time, and you like your chances for a healthy end-of-year bonus. 

Deliver 99.4% of your wholesale orders in full, on time, and you be only a tenth of a percentage point above the minimum DIFOT threshold set by some major supermarkets. 

99.4% is a pass, so nobody on your team mentions it. But next quarter, a handful of dock windows were missed, two consignments arrived short, and one pallet landed on the right day but at the wrong location.

Now your DIFOT has dropped to 98.7%, and you’re contending with a potential delisting and a critical hole in your revenue. 

In this week's Delivered, Liam Brown, Head of Operations at Salty Captain, and Rob Hango-Zada, Co-founder and Joint CEO of Shippit, explain why, if your buyer is the first person to spot a problem, the damage is already done.

TL;DR

• When it comes to wholesale DIFOT, there is a fine line between a stocked shelf and a delisted item (and your buyer is keeping a close eye on it)
• Most failures happen without the knowledge of the supplier, who often relies on a carrier or broker, and rarely has visibility of their freight after it leaves the DC
• Salty Captain was often finding out about failed deliveries four weeks later, and was paying for it in credit notes and admin hours

It’s not just you tracking your DIFOT; your buyer is too

In wholesale, DIFOT isn’t just an internal metric that logistics leaders present to the board. It’s your buyer’s record of your performance and the number they use to measure you against your competitors.

Many buyers document their DIFOT SLAs. Coles, for example, publishes a Supply Chain Report through its Supplier Central, which breaks down SLAs based on delivered in full, delivered on- time, delivered in full and on time, and fulfilment quantities.

Most buyers are very clear, but the question is: are you paying attention? You should be; a late wholesale delivery can be far harder to recover from than a WISMO query and one-star review from a disgruntled consumer. 

“If you can't maintain a supermarket's minimum DIFOT standards, your products get delisted from the shelves,” says Rob. 

Under the Food and Grocery Code - which is mandatory for supermarkets and grocery businesses earning over $5 billion a year - an affected supplier must be given a reasonable opportunity to discuss a range review outcome and a reason for the delisting. 

A DIFOT SLA is a black and white number that is hard to argue, and while a supplier makes their case their stock and their revenue sit on hold.

“On the flip side, the brands who get visibility and control over their freight performance can protect those relationships proactively, not reactively," Rob continues.

How a good freight operation drifts

Delivering to a mature buyer means booking a dock slot so a warehouse manager is there to receive the goods. 

For too many wholesale operators, that process hasn’t changed since the noughties. The window is negotiated between a carrier or a broker and the receiver, either on the phone, via email, or in a siloed portal.

It’s a manual, relationship-driven model in which you as the supplier are often peripheral to the conversation, or cut out entirely. You have little-to-no visibility, but it’s your reputation and your revenue on the line. 

“If you miss your booking slot, then you don't get your products on show," Rob explains. “If you don't get your products on show, then your out-of-stock scenarios increase and your sales take a hit.”

To circumvent that, some brands resort to hiring an operator to just sit on top of the booking process. 

“They have a spreadsheet that says ‘here are the slots that we have to meet, these ones are pending, these ones are confirmed’,” Rob adds. “I know a vitamins brand that improved their accuracy rate from roughly 11% of deliveries on time to 89% on time. But it required a human to sit on top of that process.”

The problem is, this workaround has a ceiling, a sizeable cost, and still carries its own failure rate. A person managing slots on a spreadsheet is still manual handling, which is time consuming and error prone. 

It’s a challenge Salty Captain’s Liam Brown remembers well. 

Salty Captain moves a million units a year to 800 stores and thousands of consumers nationwide. Before adopting Shippit to power its wholesale freight, Liam was keying the same orders into multiple systems. 

And that confusion didn’t stay internal for long. 

If there’s not a delisting, there is a credit note (and they add up)

For Salty Captain, that confusion often didn’t become apparent until a buyer flagged an order that had been missing for four weeks. That query is bad enough. Not being able to answer it is even worse. 

“We would have a store call us and say, ‘Hey, this hasn't been delivered’,” Liam continues. “And because they were purchase orders into stores, the store might not contact us for like four weeks.

“Here's me saying, ‘this was shipped four weeks ago’, but I've got to try and prove it somehow. I'd have to check in four different places and, because the systems are not talking to each other, trying to get a proof of delivery and then line this up and see where the fulfilment came from caused a lot of trouble.

“We would spend a lot of hours just troubleshooting what hadn't shipped.”

If you need more than a minute, let alone hours, to develop a picture of what happened, something is broken. 

Liam estimates his bookkeeper and wholesale manager were spending around half their time on delivery and invoicing disputes. While it wasn’t a delisting with a major buyer, it was regular margin erosion. 

A supplier that cannot see freight performance in real time cannot defend it after the fact, or correct it in time to protect a scorecard or hit a booking slot.

Peak doesn’t just test retailers, it tests their suppliers too

A shopper filling a trolley for Christmas lunch or working through their kids’ gift list expects full shelves. The retailer wears that pressure, then passes it straight to their suppliers with interest.

Dock capacity tightens, windows get harder to secure, and retailer tolerance drops. The risk is real. Here are five questions worth answering before peak volumes hit.

• What's our DIFOT over the last 90 days? If a buyer asked today, could you answer without opening four systems and doing sums?
• What tells us first that a delivery is slipping? If the answer is a buyer on the phone, it’s at best an awkward conversation and at worst an at-risk contract.
• Does what left our DC match what touched down at theirs? Compare your dispatch record against your buyer's receipt record on your schedule, before a dispute forces the comparison.
• Are we sending multiple consignments to the same address on the same day? If you are, you're paying more than you need to, and every extra consignment is another window to miss.
• How at-risk are our contracts? For customers with a DIFOT SLA, how many are you hitting and how many are you missing? And for those without a strict SLA, would they consider your performance reliable?

The suppliers who keep their ranging are not the businesses with perfect freight. They’re the businesses that see every consignment, in real time, and don’t have to rely on an angry call from a buyer to know a window has been missed. 

“If you're not reliable, you don't have a business,” Rob says. “If you're reliable, you have a business."