Introduction

Meeting courier cutoff times is one of the most time-pressured challenges in a fulfilment operation. Miss a cutoff and you miss a delivery promise — and that has a direct impact on customer satisfaction. OrderFlow’s new SLA Dashboard gives warehouse supervisors and operations managers real-time, at-a-glance visibility into how the day’s packing is progressing, helping teams prioritise the right shipments before it’s too late.

While the initial implementation is centred on courier cutoff times, the principles behind the dashboard — deadline-aware tracking, visual progress monitoring, and priority-driven batching — are applicable to a wide range of warehouse workflows wherever time-sensitive targets need to be manage

What Is the SLA Dashboard?

The SLA Dashboard is a new operational screen accessible from the Despatch > Shipments > SLA Dashboard menu. It aggregates live data about today’s shipments and presents it through a set of clearly readable summary panels and a filterable shipment grid, so that at any moment you can see:

• How many shipments are yet to be despatched
• How many are currently in progress
• How many have been packed in time
• How many have missed their SLA time

The dashboard is built around the concept of a Pack By deadline — the time by which a shipment must be packed to meet its courier’s collection cutoff. This deadline is calculated automatically when courier selection runs, based on the courier service’s configured cutoff times. The same deadline-driven model, however, could equally be applied to other time-bound targets: same-day order processing windows, click-and-collect preparation times, or internal pick-and-pack service level agreements with specific channels or customers.

Courier Cutoff Times

Central to the dashboard is a new cutoff time configuration on each courier service. Operators can now set separate cutoff times for weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, reflecting the reality that courier collection schedules vary across the week.

When a shipment has its courier assigned, OrderFlow automatically calculates the Pack By date and time:

• If the order was created before today’s cutoff, the Pack By is set to today at the cutoff time.
• If the order was created after today’s cutoff, the Pack By is set to tomorrow at the cutoff time.

This removes the need for manual calculation or reliance on operators knowing each courier’s cutoff from memory. More broadly, it demonstrates how configurable time rules can drive automated deadline-setting across different types of workflow — wherever a process needs to know “this must be done by when.”

The Dashboard in Detail

Headline summary panel

The top of the dashboard presents a single consolidated view of the day’s progress. Each state — To Despatch, In Progress, Packed In Time, and Missed SLA Time — is displayed as a visual indicator. Clicking on any of these indicators instantly filters the shipment grid below to show only shipments in that state.

Per-courier-service summaries

Beneath the headline panel, the dashboard shows individual summary cards for each courier service that has shipments expected to be packed today. Each card presents the same summary information as the headline panel, but scoped to a single courier service — giving managers immediate sight of which couriers are running behind. This decomposed, scoped view is a pattern that translates naturally to other contexts too: showing per-channel progress, per-warehouse-zone throughput, or per-customer SLA compliance.

Shipment detail grid

The lower section of the dashboard lists the individual shipments, with full detail on their SLA status. This grid updates dynamically as filters are applied, without changing the headline summary numbers.

Filtering

The dashboard supports a rich set of filters to focus the view on what matters most:

• Channel — narrow the view to a specific sales channel such as Amazon EU or a direct channel
• Courier — filter to a specific courier
• Courier service — drill down further to a specific service level within a courier
• SLA status — show or hide shipments by their current SLA state (colour-coded checkboxes for Packed In Time, In Progress, Missed SLA Time, and so on)
• Shipment state — filter the grid by the warehouse state of the shipment (for example, Picking, Packed, or All)

Multiple SLA statuses can be selected simultaneously, giving fine-grained control over what appears in the grid. The filtering model is intentionally flexible: as the dashboard concept is extended to other processes, additional filter dimensions can be introduced to reflect the operational context of those workflows.

Priority Batching

Alongside the SLA Dashboard, OrderFlow now supports a courier-priority batch type that can be configured to target shipments with an imminent Pack By deadline. This allows warehouse operations to surface the most time-critical shipments automatically when creating a new batch, ensuring the right orders reach pickers first.

The same principle extends beyond courier priority. Any scenario where a deadline determines picking urgency — whether driven by a courier cutoff, a customer SLA, or a time-of-day processing window — can be reflected in batch selection logic, making the most time-sensitive work visible and actionable on the warehouse floor.

A Platform for Time-Aware Warehouse Operations

The SLA Dashboard is the first materialisation of a broader capability within OrderFlow: the ability to assign meaningful deadlines to work items and surface progress against those deadlines in real time. Courier cutoffs are the natural starting point because they are universal and well-understood, but the same infrastructure — configurable deadlines, automatic Pack By calculation, visual progress tracking, and priority batching — forms a foundation that can be shaped to fit other operational commitments.

If your operation has time-sensitive workflows beyond standard courier despatch, whether that is same-day fulfilment promises, customer-specific service windows, or internal throughput targets, the SLA Dashboard model is worth exploring as a way to bring the same visibility and prioritisation to those processes.

Summary

The SLA Dashboard brings together three things that were previously managed manually or not at all: courier cutoff awareness, real-time packing progress, and actionable filtering. The result is a single screen that can meaningfully reduce the number of missed cutoffs in a busy warehouse day — and a pattern for managing any time-bound operational commitment more effectively.

The feature is available in OrderFlow version 4.5.7 (Venice) and above. If you would like to enable the SLA Dashboard for your operation, or explore how deadline-driven dashboards could be applied to other workflows, please contact your OrderFlow implementation team.