The best operating month on record, with one flag. On-time-in-full reached 95.8% (+0.5pt vs. July) and cost per order fell for the sixth straight month to $6.49 — down 15% from the December peak. The network has fully absorbed the June conveyor outage at Allentown, and average time-to-ship is at a 12-month low of 21 hours.
The flag is footwear inventory: 68 days on hand and 14.6% of units aged past 90 days — both worst in the portfolio — while East-region footwear demand stays soft. Holding through the fall reset risks a markdown bill in Q4; rebalancing now costs far less. Labor is the other gap worth attention: Allentown runs 14% below Reno on units per hour and carries 9.6% overtime, the network's highest.
OTIF 95.8%, time-to-ship 21 hours — both records. The December trough (90.6%) and the June Allentown outage are the only blemishes on the year. Note the recovery slope after each: roughly five weeks to baseline, which is the number the peak-season plan should assume.
The two visible cold spots are December (all sites, holiday volume) and Allentown's June outage. Allentown has trailed the network in all 12 months — its gap to Reno averages 2.4pts, which is structural (layout and conveyor age), not seasonal.
Turns at 6.5, stockouts at 1.8% — both the best of the year. Aggregate inventory is the healthiest it has been; the problem is concentration. One category holds most of the risk.
| Category | Days on hand | Turns | Stockout % | Aged >90 days |
|---|
Footwear is the outlier on every column — and its aged share (14.6%) maps directly to the East-region softness flagged in the weekly reviews. The aged units are concentrated in 14 SKUs; action 1 proposes moving them before the fall reset rather than marking them down in Q4.
$6.49, down from $7.61 in December. Every component fell or held: labor −6% since March on batching improvements, shipping −7% from the carrier renegotiation, packaging flat, overhead flat.
| Warehouse | Units per hour | Overtime % | Headcount |
|---|
Closing half of Allentown's UPH gap to Reno is worth roughly $0.18 per order network-wide — more than the next carrier negotiation. The overtime pattern says it's a staffing-shape problem (weekend coverage), not effort.
Order defect rate 1.4% — a record low. The dimensional-packaging change (April) keeps paying off: damaged-in-transit share of returns is down to 14% from 19% a year ago.
| Reason | Share of returns | vs. July |
|---|
Size/fit remains the biggest bucket (38%) but fell 2pts after the new size-guide rollout. The "Other" bucket jumped 3pts — worth a tagging audit before it hides a real signal.