Injection Molding

OTIF Benchmarks for Injection Molders

Two molders reporting the same OTIF can be performing very differently, because almost every term in the definition is negotiable and most customers set it in their own favour.

On-time-in-full is a conjunction, and conjunctions multiply. A molder shipping 95% of orders on time and 96% in full does not report 95% OTIF; it reports about 91.2%, because an order must satisfy both conditions to count. That multiplication is the first surprise, and it is why OTIF always reads lower than the component metrics a plant is used to seeing.

• On time: 95%
• In full: 96%
• OTIF, the product of both: 91.2%

Five definitional choices that move the number

Agree every one of these in writing

• Which date counts: ship date from your dock, or receipt date at theirs. The second makes you responsible for carrier performance you do not control.
• The window: whether early delivery counts as on time. Many customers running lean operations count early as a miss, and molders are routinely surprised by this.
• Original versus revised date. If the customer pulled the order in, most agreements still measure against the original commitment unless the revision was mutually agreed and recorded.
• Line level versus order level. An order of ten lines with one short is zero percent at order level and ninety percent at line level.
• Tolerance on quantity, since molding yields vary and a small over or under shipment may or may not count as in full.

Why I am not publishing a benchmark figure

You will find OTIF benchmarks quoted for custom molding, and I would treat them cautiously, because every figure above depends on definitions the publisher rarely states. A molder measuring at line level against a ship date will report substantially better performance than one measuring at order level against a receipt date, with identical underlying operations. The comparison that means something is your own trend under a fixed definition, and your performance against each customer's specific scorecard.

OTIF is not a measurement of your plant. It is a measurement of your plant under a definition your customer wrote, and the definition moves the number more than the plant does.

What actually drives molder OTIF

In custom molding the recurring causes are consistent: resin availability, tooling downtime, changeover overrun, and yield shortfalls that turn a full shipment into a partial one. Of these, tooling is the one most often under-managed, because a mold that goes down mid-campaign has no substitute and the recovery time is measured in days. A preventive maintenance schedule driven by shots since last service is the single most effective OTIF intervention available to most molders, and it sits in maintenance rather than in planning.

Measure it yourself before the customer does

The worst position is learning your OTIF from a customer scorecard, because by then the number is disputed history and you are arguing about definitions after the fact. Compute it internally, under each customer's stated definition, and reconcile monthly. Where the numbers differ, the reconciliation itself surfaces the definitional gap early enough to fix it, which is usually more valuable than the metric.

Use the mold parts per hour calculator to model how tooling downtime translates into shipment risk. Check mold uptime

Published 2026-08-08.