Standings - SLA Metrics and Client Scoreboard

How to Read SLA Metrics for Barcoding and EDI Services

Performance figures are only useful when you know what they measure. In barcoding and EDI work, a single "uptime" number rarely tells the whole story, so it helps to understand the separate measures that usually sit behind an SLA and how each one affects your supply chain.

Common measures in an EDI service level agreement

• Translator and gateway availability: the share of scheduled time during which documents can be sent and received. Planned maintenance windows are normally excluded, so check how they are defined and announced.
• Document turnaround: how quickly an inbound purchase order (850) is translated and delivered to your system, or how quickly an outbound advance ship notice (856) or invoice (810) reaches the trading partner.
• Functional acknowledgement timeliness: whether 997 or 999 acknowledgements are returned within the window your retail or manufacturing partners require. Late acknowledgements are a frequent cause of chargebacks.
• Error resolution time: how long it takes from a rejected or failed transaction to a corrected resend, often tiered by severity.
• Label and barcode accuracy: scan-rate and compliance checks on GS1-128 shipping labels, UPC and SSCC data, since an unreadable label can delay receiving at a distribution centre.

Questions worth asking about any scoreboard

When comparing figures, look at the measurement period, whether averages hide occasional long outages, and whether results are reported per trading partner or across all traffic. A monthly figure of 99.9% availability still allows roughly 43 minutes of downtime, which matters more if it falls during a peak order cut-off than overnight.

It is also worth agreeing on how incidents are reported, which time zone applies to deadlines, and what happens when a failure originates at a partner's VAN or AS2 endpoint rather than with your provider.

Turning metrics into action

The most practical use of SLA data is spotting trends early: a slow rise in rejected documents often points to a partner's updated mapping specification, and repeated label failures may signal printer calibration or data issues upstream. To see how these areas are handled day to day, visit our solutions overview, or use the support page if you need help interpreting a particular measure.