📉 My Achieved Service Levels are Too Low
Your "Achieved Service Level" is a critical metric: it reflects how often you actually had stock available to meet customer demand. If you notice that you are suffering from declining service levels—or that your achieved levels are consistently missing your desired targets—it means you are experiencing too many stockouts.
This usually happens when there is a disconnect between your real-world supply chain and your Optiply settings. Here is a breakdown of the 5 most common causes and exactly how to fix them.
🛑 1. Key Takeaways: The 5 Causes of Low Service Levels
If your service levels are dropping, review these core areas of your daily purchasing routine:
Cause 1: Not Following the Order Agenda
Ordering late has a massive negative impact on your service level. The system calculates order quantities precisely so that you have enough stock to survive until your next planned order. If you skip an order day, you will run out of stock before the next delivery arrives. (Naturally, being a day late for a supplier you order from daily hurts much more than a supplier you order from every 90 days).
The Fix: Always check if any orders are overdue by navigating to Purchase > Planned orders.
Cause 2: Constantly Changing Order Recommendations
Adjusting the given order advice downwards too often has a direct, negative effect on your service levels. If you consistently manually order less than Optiply suggests, too little stock is coming in to meet customer demand.
The Fix: Trust the system! If you constantly feel the need to lower the advice, it indicates that your underlying settings do not fit your actual supply chain strategy.
Cause 3: Delivery Times are Structurally Longer Than Expected
When a supplier is unreliable, it will immediately affect your service levels. While Optiply automatically takes historical standard deviations into account, extreme outliers or consistently late deliveries lead to low stock.
The Fix: You have two options. Either make strict agreements with the supplier to improve their reliability, or adjust the delivery time in Optiply to reflect reality (Suppliers > Delivery time).
⚠️ Important Note: Manually increasing the delivery time in the system will fix your service levels, but it will lead to higher baseline stock levels, as the system buys more buffer to survive the unreliability!
Cause 4: Forgetting to Phase Out Discontinued Products
When a product can no longer be delivered by a supplier, or you decide to stop selling it, it will eventually go out of stock. If it is still active in Optiply, every day it sits at 0 stock, dragging your overall Achieved Service Level down!
The Fix: (Temporarily) phasing out the product is the best way to deal with this. Changing its status to "Phased Out" ensures the product is no longer included in your service level calculations.
Cause 5: Service Levels Set Incorrectly
Finally, your baseline goals might simply be misconfigured.
The Fix: Check if your desired service levels are set realistically for your business model by navigating to Settings > Categories & Service Level.
❓ 2. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How do I find out which products are dragging my service level down?
Products that generate a higher total margin have a mathematically heavier impact on the overall service level of their category. To quickly find the culprits dragging your score down:
Navigate to your Products page.
Filter by the specific Category that has a disappointing service level (e.g., Category 'A').
Sort the list by 'Demand per month' (highest to lowest).
Review the top products on this list to see which ones have a poor individual achieved service level.
Why does increasing my lead time fix my service level?
When you increase the lead time in the system, you are telling the algorithm, "This supplier is slow, so we need to order earlier." By ordering earlier, the goods arrive before you run out, which protects your stock availability and keeps your service level high.