How is Your Supply Chain Performing? How do you Compare with Others in Your Industry?

Do you know the answers to the two questions in the heading of this article?

If not, there is no time like the present to begin taking steps to answer them. Let’s take a slightly more detailed look at each of them in turn.

How is your Supply Chain performing?

To answer this question you need an appropriate set of Key Performance Indicators or KPIs, to measure and keep track of your supply chain and logistics performance.  We all know the phrase…”what you don’t measure you can’t manage”.

Of course, there are many functions and activities involved in supply chain operations, so as you might imagine, you will need KPIs that track performance across all these functions, as well as KPIs targeting performance within specific functions… and they all need to be aligned to avoid conflicts.

However, in developing your supply chain and logistics KPIs, you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel. Many existing KPIs can be applied (with or without some adaptation) to your own operations. In fact, you can see a selection of commonly used supply chain metrics over on our KPI page.

How do you compare with others in your industry?

To answer this second question, you really need to know the KPI performance of others in your industry. Then you need to benchmark your own supply chain against the results being achieved in your particular sector.

Industry results though, are not quite so easy to obtain. Supply chain benchmarking can be a complex project, and when it comes to finding peer-organisations prepared to share their performance data, a frustrating one too.

Yet without that data, you have no way of knowing if your company is achieving a level of supply chain performance that competes effectively within your industry.

At this very moment, your enterprise could be an industry leader, although that is rarely the case for companies that don’t actively track and benchmark performance. On the other hand, you could be sitting comfortably within the average range of performance, or…

You might be well behind the pack, in which case you are probably missing out on a lot of good business, which instead, is being enjoyed by your competitors.

You would be right to feel anxious if your business is operating in seemingly blissful ignorance as to its supply chain performance… But the good news is that you can remedy that lack of vital intelligence without undertaking an expensive and time-consuming benchmarking project.

Get the Benchmarking Data You Need… The Easy Way

Thankfully, you can get the supply-chain-performance data you need right here, because at Benchmarking Success, we compile detailed reports containing KPI results for six key industries, comprising:

• Imported goods distribution
• Food and beverage (we have reports for both ambient and chilled sectors)
• Industrial supply
• FMCG
• Pharmaceutical
• Manufacturing

To learn more about these reports and get some more information about supply chain KPI development, visit our KPI page, or if you’d like to know how to obtain a report for your business, contact Benchmarking Success today.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in February 2015. It has now been revamped and extended to provide more comprehensive information.