Logistics and Supply Chain Management, 6th Edition

Benchmarking

The intense level of competitive activity encountered in most markets has led to a new emphasis on measuring performance not just in absolute terms, but rather in terms relative to the competition, and beyond that to ‘best practice’.

In the past it was usually deemed to be sufficient simply to measure internal performance. In other words, the focus was on things such as productivity, utilisation, cost per activity and so on. Whilst it is clearly important that such things continue to be measured and controlled it also has to be recognised that such measures only have meaning when they are compared against a relevant ‘metric’ or benchmark. What should be the metric that is used in assessing logistics and supply chain performance? ...