SLA (Service Level Agreement)

What turns an SLA into an operational problem is that it runs on its own. The clock starts when the request comes in, not when someone looks at it, so most breaches do not come from a difficult repair but from an order that sat four hours unassigned.

That is why the useful control is the one that warns before expiry and escalates if nobody picked up the case. Measuring it afterwards serves the penalty, not its avoidance. And proving compliance requires evidence with time and location: without that, the discussion with the customer is one word against another.