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Metrics type: Key MetricsCategory: Delivery Performance

At a glance

On-time delivery rate broken out per destination country across PostNord’s four core Nordic markets: Sweden (SE), Norway (NO), Denmark (DK) and Finland (FI). The blended OTD dial can read healthy while a single country quietly degrades, so this horizontal-bar card separates each national network. Because PostNord runs distinct per-country operations (with the SE / DK heritage from the Posten Sverige and Post Danmark merger, plus NO and FI delivery partners), a drop confined to one country is almost always a local operational signal, not a network-wide one.

Calculation

Calculated automatically from your PostNord data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

Worked example

A Stockholm-based DTC outdoor-apparel brand shipping pan-Nordic on PostNord, around 2,800 parcels a week. Reading taken at 09:00 CET on 14 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days (12 Feb 26 to 13 Mar 26). The blended dial reads 95.4 percent, which on the headline On-Time Delivery Rate card would not trip its <95% warn. But the Norway bar reads 87.0 percent, below the any country <90% floor, so this card fires. Five things to notice:
  1. The blend hid the problem. Sweden’s volume (54 percent of parcels) is propping up the aggregate. Norway is collapsing and the headline card barely flinched. This per-country view is the reason the card exists.
  2. A 7.4-point single-country drop in February is a strong weather candidate. Norway routes are the most weather-exposed in the network. Cross-check the PostNord service alerts for the period: a northern-Norway snow event or a closed mountain corridor explains a sharp NO-only drop without any SE / DK / FI movement.
  3. If it is not weather, it is customs. Norway is outside the EU customs union, so SE-to-NO and DK-to-NO parcels clear a border. A customs backlog drops Norway OTD specifically. Confirm against SE-to-NO Customs Clearance Rate (<3d): if clearance has slipped, the OTD drop is border-driven, not last-mile.
  4. Sweden and Denmark are the operational baseline. SE at 97.4 and DK at 96.1 are healthy incumbent-network readings. Use them as the control: if SE / DK are steady and only NO moves, the cause is specific to the Norway corridor, not a pan-Nordic PostNord problem.
  5. Finland’s -1.1 point drift is noise, not a signal. A point of movement on the smallest-volume country is within normal monthly variation. Do not action FI on this reading; watch whether it trends over two or three periods before treating it as real.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Per-country OTD localises a problem; pair it with these to find the cause and the cost:

Reconciling against the source

Where to look in PostNord’s own tooling: Open the PostNord Business Portal shipment / delivery report and filter by destination country (Land), service code, and a 30-day delivered window. The closest like-for-like view is delivered consignments per country against their aim date. PostNord publishes per-market service information, so a country drop here should be checked against PostNord’s country-specific service alerts for the same dates. Why our number may legitimately differ from the portal:

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why does Norway always sit a few points below Sweden, even in a good month? Geography and customs. Norway has longer transit corridors, more weather-exposed routes, and is outside the EU customs union so cross-border parcels clear a border. A structural 2 to 5 point gap below Sweden is normal. The alert at 90 percent is set to catch a genuine breakdown, not this baseline gap. Read NO alongside SE-to-NO Customs Clearance Rate (<3d). One country dropped but the headline OTD looks fine. Which do I trust? Both, for different jobs. The headline tells you overall network health; this card tells you where a problem is concentrated. A high-volume country can mask a small-country collapse in the blend, which is exactly why per-country exists. Action the country that breached, weighted by its share on Revenue Mix by Nordic Country (SE/NO/DK/FI). Is a single-country winter drop a carrier failure? Often not. Nordic winters close roads in northern Sweden and Norway and suspend Danish archipelago ferry routes. A December-to-February dip on NO / FI of a few points is climate. The card does not auto-exclude weather days, it records actual experience, so annotate seasonal context rather than re-baselining permanently. Finland moved a point. Should I act? Probably not yet. Finland is usually the smallest-volume bar, so a single point of movement is within monthly noise. Wait for a trend across two or three periods before treating it as real. The vsP change column helps you see whether a move is sustained. Why might a country’s bar differ from the PostNord portal’s figure? Time zone and attribution. PostNord records scans in carrier-local time across CET and Finland’s EET, so midnight-boundary deliveries shift between days. Cross-border parcels are attributed here to the destination country, which a portal report grouped by origin will split differently. The totals reconcile once you align the filter and allow for ingestion lag. A country dropped below 90 percent. What is the playbook? In order: (1) check PostNord’s country-specific service alerts for weather or incidents on the dates, (2) if the country is Norway, check SE-to-NO Customs Clearance Rate (<3d) for a border backlog, (3) drill into OTD by Route to see if the drop is whole-country or concentrated on a few lanes, (4) if the country runs chronically low, evaluate routing it via Bring or DPD.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

OTD by Nordic Country is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across PostNord and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.