Audience: Suppliers

Service Level Agreement (SLA) rules and deadlines are used to set up performance expectations between a retailer and their suppliers.

Here are some guidelines on how rules are set up and how deadlines are calculated:

• Rule Conditions and Expectations
• Rule Hierarchy
• Order SLA deadlines
• Backorders/Estimated ship date updated by supplier
• Inventory SLA deadlines
• Business days, calendars, and cutoff times
• Archiving open exceptions 

For more information about SLAs, see Getting started with performance management, About SLA metrics, and About Insights metrics and data fields.

Rule Conditions and Expectations

SLA rules are used to determine deadlines for SLA metrics. Rules have two fundamental components: conditions and expectations. For example, a Created > Shipped rule may state that a specific set of suppliers (conditions) need to ship their orders within a two business days (expectation). Note that not all metrics support all conditions and expectation types.

• Conditions can include options such as Supplier, SKU, or Ship by Date. If no conditions are specified, the rule will be treated as a “catch all”, and may be applied to any orders or suppliers. Rules may also explicitly choose not to measure certain conditions.
• Expectations can be specified with options such as Business days based on the supplier’s/retailer’s calendar or Continuous time (24 x 7) in minutes or hours.

Rule Hierarchy

• Rules are stacked in a hierarchy. When an order is created, it is evaluated against SLA rule conditions from top to bottom. The first rule that has a matching condition is applied and sets the deadline.
• Retailers define a “default rule” to be applied to orders that did not satisfy any higher conditions in the hierarchy.

Order SLA deadlines

Order SLA deadlines are calculated in one of three ways:

Backorders/Estimated ship date updated by supplier

• Some retailers allow suppliers to update the estimated ship date for a shipment (for example, if an item is on backordered). If a supplier revises their ship date, exception notifications for that order will be “snoozed.”
• If the order is not shipped when the revised ship date passes, the SLA will start sending notifications.
• For historical reporting purposes, the line item will be evaluated against the original Created > Shipped deadline.

Inventory SLA deadlines

Business days, calendars, and cutoff times

• An operating calendar defines which days are non-business days (weekends, holidays, and so on). The rule can be based on the retailer’s operating calendar or the supplier’s operating calendar. The retailer determines which calendar is used.
• A cutoff time defines when “processing” for a day stops. For example, if the cutoff time is 5:00 pm, and an order arrives at 6:00 pm, the clock for the SLA contract won’t be started until the next business day.
• A time zone is used to define the boundaries of a day (for example, 2:00 AM ET Tuesday is 11:00 PM PT Monday). For setting violation deadlines, the time zone used for an SLA depends on which calendar is used. If a supplier does not specify a time zone in their warehouse operating calendar, UTC (GMT) is used.

Archiving open exceptions

SLA exceptions are intended to be a real-time signal to help retailers and suppliers prioritize their work. If an SLA exception is open for more than 90 days, the exception will be archived.

The order will still be actionable, and a violation will still be recorded.