Supply Chain Management Best Practices, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 3Supply Chain Metrics: Measuring Up to High Standards

Flashpoints

• Statistics are a vital part of managing a supply chain.
• The smarter you are at measuring performance metrics, the better your supply chain will run.
• Benchmarking lets you know exactly how good (or bad) your company is doing.
• Keeping a supply chain scorecard will help you set and achieve attainable targets.

It's probably just a coincidence, but the rise in popularity of supply chain management occurred at the same time as the emergence of sabermetrics. No, you're not going to find that term defined in any business management journal; sabermetrics is the application of statistical analysis and research to the game of baseball. When personal computers became affordable in the early 1980s, supply chain analysts and sabermetricians alike fell in love with databases and spreadsheets that could crunch months' worth of product forecasts and decades' worth of box scores in minutes, rather than days. These days, “keeping a scorecard” is as much a part of the supply chain language as it is sports talk.

To paraphrase John Thorn, coeditor of Total Baseball, statistics are not just a cold-blooded means of dissecting profit-and-loss reports in order to examine a company's performance; rather, statistics are a vital part of the supply chain. The supply chain may be appreciated without statistics, but it cannot be understood without them.¹

To continue the sports analogy, in the fall of 2018, the only event in ...