Who Uses SLI? Key Stakeholders and Roles Explained

Who interacts with and relies on SLI?

SLIs are practical, numeric signals that tell people whether a service is performing as expected. That means many different roles will either create, monitor, respond to, or act on SLIs. Below are the most common stakeholders, what they need from SLIs, and how they use them in everyday work.

Operations and Warehouse Teams

Warehouse managers, floor supervisors, and inventory controllers in distribution centers use SLIs to measure operational health. Typical SLIs for these teams include on-time shipping rate, order-picking accuracy, inventory accuracy, and dock-to-stock time. These indicators help frontline teams detect disruptions, prioritize corrective actions, and manage staffing and layout changes.

Supply Chain and Logistics Managers

Supply chain planners and logistics managers use SLIs to track upstream and downstream performance such as supplier fill rate, carrier on-time delivery, and lead time variability. These SLIs feed into decisions about safety stock, alternative sourcing, and transportation mode selection.

Customer Success, Sales, and Account Managers

Customer-facing teams rely on SLIs to communicate service reliability and meet expectations. Common SLIs here are order fulfillment rate, delivery within promised windows, and damage-free delivery percentage. When SLIs dip, account managers use the data to manage customer communications, offer remediation, and negotiate credits or service improvements.

IT, DevOps, and SRE Teams

In technology-driven operations, IT and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams define SLIs for digital services such as order management systems, APIs, and tracking platforms. Examples include system availability, API latency, and error rate. These SLIs are often the first alerts for incidents and guide engineering priorities for reliability improvements.

Quality Assurance and Compliance

Quality teams use SLIs to detect trends that affect compliance and product quality, such as defect rate per batch, return rate, and damage incidents per hundred shipments. SLIs help QA teams trigger audits, supplier reviews, or process changes when thresholds are breached.

Executives and Business Analysts

Leadership uses aggregated SLIs as high-level health metrics for the business. SLIs such as overall on-time delivery percentage, average order cycle time, and customer satisfaction proxies feed into quarterly reviews, forecasting, and strategic planning. Business analysts convert raw SLI data into insights that drive cost/benefit decisions.

Third-party Partners and Carriers

Logistics service providers, 3PLs, and carriers often exchange SLI-related data with customers. Carriers might report on-time pickup and delivery SLIs, while 3PLs provide fulfillment accuracy and throughput SLIs. Clear SLIs enable objective performance discussions and contractual enforcement.

Customers and End Users

Although not always directly exposed to the raw metric, customers experience SLIs as the observable quality of service: whether orders arrive on time, whether tracking is accurate, and whether returns are handled smoothly. Customer feedback often becomes a qualitative SLI input, leading to metric refinement.

Common interactions between roles

• Operations provide raw data; IT validates and streams that data into dashboards.
• Supply chain teams analyze SLI trends to adjust forecasts and safety stock.
• Customer success uses SLIs to inform customers and manage escalations.
• Executives review aggregated SLIs to set strategic priorities and budgets.

Practical example

If the SLI “on-time delivery rate” drops from 96% to 88% over two weeks, multiple stakeholders get involved: warehouse supervisors check packing and routing issues, logistics managers examine carrier performance, customer success prepares proactive communications, IT verifies if any system outages impacted shipments, and executives may request a cross-functional task force to restore targets.

Best practices for stakeholder collaboration

• Define clear ownership: assign each SLI an owner responsible for its accuracy and improvement.
• Use common definitions: ensure all teams use the same calculation method and time window.
• Create role-specific dashboards: show operational detail for frontline teams and rollups for leadership.
• Schedule regular reviews: daily for operations, weekly for logistics, and monthly for executives.
• Link SLIs to actions: define playbooks for common SLI breaches so stakeholders know next steps.

Conclusion

SLIs are not owned by a single role; they are a shared language across the organization. From warehouse staff to executives, each stakeholder uses SLI data differently but depends on the same core principle: accurate, timely indicators enable faster decisions, clearer accountability, and continuous service improvement.