Delivery makes a difference for customers. According to 2025 survey data, 48% of consumers said that a bad delivery experience affects their willingness to buy from a brand again.
For many manufacturers, delivery problems can occur downstream—once products leave the factory or warehouse, delivery is the responsibility of contracted transport companies. However, on-time delivery (OTD) rates depend largely on manufacturing practices.
OTD represents the percentage of orders delivered on or before the promised delivery date. For example, if a factory produces 10,000 parts per week and 8,000 are delivered on time, its OTD is 80%.
While logistics plays a key role in OTD, operational discipline is just as critical. Even the most reliable transportation partner can’t meet delivery expectations if production lines can’t keep pace with demand or if equipment issues create the need for reworks.
In this piece, we’ll explore common causes of delivery delays and offer practical advice to optimize OTD.
Common causes of late deliveries in manufacturing
There are several common causes of late delivery for manufacturers, including:
- Unplanned downtime and equipment failures
- Poor production scheduling and capacity planning
- Material shortages and supplier delays
- Inefficient maintenance practices
- Lack of operational visibility
While even one of these challenges can delay deliveries and cause OTD issues, they often occur in tandem. Consider a manufacturer that relies on reactive maintenance to fix critical equipment issues. These reactive processes lead to unplanned and extended machine downtime as the company struggles to find and install critical parts. Paired with supplier delays tied to single-source supply chain management, what could have been a minor issue becomes a serious problem for OTD metrics.
Here are nine ways to improve on-time delivery operations in manufacturing.
1. Improve production planning and scheduling
Better planning reduces production problems. Manufacturing plans have two key components: Time and effort.
Effort refers to how work is performed—through equipment, operators and maintenance teams. Time refers to when work is performed—whether scheduled in advance or triggered by specific operational conditions.
The challenge? Plans and schedules that don’t align with operational realities, leading to unrealistic lead times and missed delivery dates.
Four best practices can help align maintenance and production processes:
1. Aligning production schedules with actual machine and labor availability
2. Using realistic lead times to reduce overpromising
3. Improving coordination between planning, production and maintenance teams
4. Creating and applying standardized scheduling processes across shifts and plants
These practices set the stage for ongoing OTD improvements.
2. Reduce unplanned downtime through reliability improvements
Planned downtime is commonplace in manufacturing operations. Machines may need to be taken offline for scheduled maintenance, upgrading or replacement.
Unplanned downtime, meanwhile, is more problematic. This type of downtime may occur as a result of equipment failures, operator safety issues or power outages. Because it is unplanned, it is also unexpected, which means companies don’t know how long it will last.
The result of unplanned downtime is reduced OTD. Consider a company with an average per-item production time of 10 minutes. If the equipment is down for 6 hours (360 minutes), order processing is now 36 products behind. This means 36 products that aren’t packaged or shipped on time, in turn hindering on-time delivery.
Reducing unplanned downtime starts with root cause failure analysis (RCFA), which helps pinpoint the source of issues rather than the symptoms, and bottleneck analysis to identify slowdowns. Next is standardizing maintenance processes to include regularly scheduled repairs along with the use of real-time sensors to collect performance data.
The use of this data underpins a shift from reactive to predictive and preventive maintenance. By comparing current performance to past data, teams can create preventive maintenance schedules that address common issues and anticipate future problems before they occur.
3. Strengthen maintenance and asset performance
Industrial asset management and performance is tied to strong maintenance practices because well-maintained assets produce more predictable outputs. Both are informed by a comprehensive strategy.
Creating an effective strategy starts with identifying key production priorities. These priorities may include specific cycle times or rework volumes and may also be impacted by target OTD rates.
Next is building a spare parts process that ensures the inventory availability of replacements for frequently worn, damaged or broken components. Finally, teams should establish standardized maintenance workflows. For example, machine health monitoring systems provide a way to detect issues and create targeted responses, which helps reduce average repair time and limit equipment variability between scheduled maintenance.
4. Improve supply chain coordination and material availability
According to data from McKinsey, 90% of companies experienced supply chain challenges in 2024. While multiple variables contribute to these challenges, the outcomes remain consistent: material delays and shortages. Without access to necessary materials, manufacturers can’t meet timely delivery expectations.
Businesses can take several steps to improve supply chain resiliency:
- Improve communication with suppliers to reduce lead time and anticipate demand changes.
- Standardize material requirements and specifications.
- Reduce variability across inventory management practices.
- Build contingency plans, such as multisource supply chains, for critical materials.
While it’s impossible to eliminate supply chain challenges, a multipronged approach can significantly reduce disruptions.
5. Increase visibility across operations
Next up is visibility. If companies can’t see what’s happening across production line processes and maintenance team operations, the result is a lack of real-time insight that leads to late problem detection.
Siloed operations are a common cause of limited visibility. Operators, maintenance teams, managers, and administrators often rely on separate tools to manage production, creating gaps in visibility and redundant work.
Two strategies help boost visibility. First is standardized data collection, using tools such as computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. Next is ensuring cross-functional visibility across production, maintenance and supply chain processes. This requires the analysis of standardized data to help pinpoint potential trends and develop actionable strategies.
6. Use data to identify and eliminate bottlenecks
Data helps support continuous improvement initiatives by helping companies identify, track and improve key metrics.
Common manufacturing metrics to measure include:
- OTD
- Planned and unplanned downtime
- Schedule adherence
- Cycle time
- Mean time between failures (MTBF)
- Mean time to repair (MTTR)
- Mean time to detect (MTTD)
Equipped with this data, companies can develop continuous improvement initiatives that enhance maintenance efficacy and reduce downtime. This data also helps teams pinpoint and eliminate recurring bottlenecks and capacity constraints.
7. Standardize processes to reduce variability
Variability is the enemy of delivery cycle time. Process or equipment variability makes it impossible to accurately predict output volumes, which in turn reduces OTD.
Creating standardized processes for data collection, issue reporting and maintenance processes helps create predictable outcomes. This reduces errors and delays, leads to faster onboarding and cross-training, and makes it easier to replicate best practices across facilities.
8. Align teams around delivery performance goals
Alignment also plays a role in OTD success. This starts with shared KPIs across production, maintenance and supply chain teams. Next are regular performance reviews and root cause discussions—are current OTD goals being met? If not, why not, and what can be done to improve delivery time metrics?
Finally, manufacturers should also define clear ownership of delivery performance. This starts from the top. Organizations should assign a C-suite leader and give them both the staffing and budgetary resources required to create standardized OTD frameworks.
9. Build resilience into manufacturing operations
Even with well-designed processes, production will occasionally deviate from plan. To navigate operational efficiency roadblocks, companies require both resilience and flexibility.
In practice, this includes:
- Redundancy across critical assets and suppliers
- Cross-trained workforces to handle disruptions
- Proactive risk identification and mitigation
- Scenario planning for high-impact disruptions
Taking a resilience-focused approach enables manufacturers to dynamically respond as issues occur, in turn minimizing the impact of disruptions on OTD rates.
On-time delivery is earned through operational excellence
On-time delivery isn’t just about logistics. Instead, it’s the outcome of reliable, disciplined operations. These operations include standardized maintenance strategies, in-depth process planning and comprehensive data collection and analysis.
Continuous improvement underpins these operations and drives improved OTD. But this requires more than management strategies and reliability monitoring tools. Instead, it demands a mindset shift that recognizes on-time delivery not as an endpoint, but an ongoing process that drives sustained OTD success.
Discover how ATS can help your teams build a better OTD strategy. Let’s talk.
References
McKinsey & Company. (2024, October 14). McKinsey Global Supply Chain Leader Survey 2024: Supply chains—Still vulnerable. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/supply-chain-risk-survey-2024
Sifted Team. (2025, September 16). 2025 consumer survey: The importance of a positive delivery experience for customer loyalty. https://sifted.com/resources/2025-consumer-survey-the-importance-of-a-positive-delivery-experience-for-customer-loyalty/
