Vendor Order Fill Rates

The Vendor Order Fill Rates dashboard is designed to monitor order activity by vendor and provide insights & trends of their performance filling orders. Challenges to supply chains can be disruptive & necessitate adjustments to processes as well as to the vendors selected. You will start with a few basic KPIs to understand the volumes you are analyzing and have the ability to filter to specific product groupings as granular as individual items.

On this dashboard you can analyze trends of specific vendors or manufacturers, those vendors or manufacturers who supply certain product groupings, and the volumes of product groupings for vendors or manufacturers. You will be able to compare vendors against each other and make decisions to shift your buying to those with better performance. You will see fill rates for entire orders and individual items - both important in making decisions about where to place future orders.

Keep in mind as you navigate this dashboard that some "orders" or parts of orders in the system are created for over / short as an example, and might not have an actual quantity ordered - where orders or parts of orders have zero quantity ordered, they have been excluded from the metrics.

You will want to pay attention to the order dates in the dashboard filter - very recent orders that have not yet had a chance to be filled will affect the metrics. You may want to exclude certain vendors, such as your warehouse, from the analysis - use the Vendor Name filter on the dashboard to do this.

The KPI section is fairly simple and reflects the volume of orders & vendors along with two fill rates. The fill rates are different only in that they average by order (as filtered on the dashboard) or by vendor (as filtered on the dashboard). Most of the dashboard metrics reflect the average by order, as this is your overall basis. When analyzing specific product groupings, however, it might be helpful for you to see the average by vendor & then look for the vendors that perform relative to the average.

Avg Order Fill Rate (Avg by Order) is the total quantity filled vs. ordered, by order
Avg Order Fill Rate (Avg by Vendor) is the total quantity filled vs. ordered, by vendor

Understanding where your vendors rank, both in terms of volumes of orders and order fill rates is an important comparison - both metrics are important to consider & neither will tell you the whole story.  Take for example, a vendor that consistently has very high fill rates - if your volume of ordering with them is one or two orders a year, this might not be as critical to know as a vendor from whom you order twice each month. The scatter charts will show you the bottom and top performing vendors in terms of fill rates - these charts are affected by the dashboard filters. You can hover over the markers to see the details; you can also hover on the legend to see where a particular vendor falls on the chart. Toggle the vendors in the legend to turn them on & off in the chart.

The next graphic reflects both the order volume and the average fill rate - this can be helpful to identify and analyze vendors where you do certain levels of business. Remember that the dashboard filters will affect the results here - so you are able to look at the vendors with a minimum # of orders for specific product groupings as an example.

The next section of graphics allows you to see how your product groupings are ordered by vendor or manufacturer, and to the right a trend line of the order fill rates. Each of these two graphics allow you to switch the dimensions of the graphic - on either a column or a line, right click and choose switch dimensions to see what is available. Once you choose a new dimension, the graphic will adjust and the widget header will show your choice. In the column chart, you are able to switch both the category (vendor or manufacturer) and how the columns are allocated by product grouping:

You can use the column chart to isolate which vendors or manufacturers warrant a closer look - for example, with the dashboard filters set to include all, you'll see all vendors listed in the date range and depending on the product grouping you choose as a dimension, the columns will show the volumes of those groupings by vendor. This can help you choose to include or exclude certain vendors depending on your analysis needs. Click on a column to filter the dashboard and dig into the data. You can also use the column chart to focus on a particular product grouping using a combination of the switch dimension feature and the dashboard filters. This can help you quickly focus on the vendors you use to order this product & how they perform - and allow you to make approriate changes to best order your product.

A combination column & line chart follows, with a pivot table to the right. The chart allows you to switch dimensions as described above, and will show you the order fill rates as compared with order volumes. Use this chart to identify vendors, manufacturers or product groupings where the volume of orders and the rate at which they are filled warrant scrutiny. Again, use the dashboard filters if you need to focus on specific data. Clicking on a column here will filter the dashboard, and you will see the relevant data listed in the pivot table to the right with order metrics. 

On the pivot table you can click in the header area to add or remove columns. Take care before listing Items since a very large item listing could stall the data from loading - use dashboard filters to narrow the listing. 

It's a good idea to review this information periodically so you can get ahead of deteriorating performance and before you experience hard-to-recover scenarios. 

A larger scope pivot table allows you to add & remove fields, again by clicking in the header area to see what is available. Again here, take care before listing Items since a very large item listing could stall the data from loading - use dashboard filters to narrow the listing. Adding some fields will expand the detail of your orders, for example adding Due Date or Expiration Date can add rows for individual orders.

As mentioned earlier, some "orders" or parts of orders in the system are created for over / short as an example, and might not have an actual quantity ordered. Depending on the fields that you add to this table, you might see quantity ordered = 0 for some orders.

Any of the data tables can be exported to work with the data outside the dashboard. Do this by clicking on the 3 dots at the top right corner of the widget, choose Download and export an image or file.  The recommended file type for a spreadsheet is CSV.