A Software as a Solution Supply Chain provider, Kinaxis, launched a new free Benchmarking Service for companies interested in comparing their supply chain performance against others across various metrics.

The benchmarking provides a competitive comparison and ranks your company on any of 24 standard financial and operational metrics, such as cash-to-cash, inventory turns, gross margin and return on invested capital.  The service can also be used by private companies and it allows them to confidentially enter their metrics into the system to set up comparisons.

This type of tool can be very useful to a company to understand how other organizations are performing on the metrics that are most meaningful as well as identifying areas for perfomance improvement.

The Benchmarking Service is being offered at no cost to and just requires registering as a member of the free Supply Chain Expert community and then clicking on the Benchmark My Company

A new report from Aberdeen Group shows that given the current economic climate, 91% of companies are actively seeking ways to improve their inventory performance through process change.  The study also showed that 62% of companies reported a drop in customer demand over the past year which has resulted in the new focus on inventory to avoid write-offs and improve working capital. 

The report also shows that the use of information technology is critical in improving inventory with 61% of respondents making inventory-related technology recommendations within the past six months.  Best-in-Class companies are more likely to use technology for improving inventory replenishment, demand analysis, inventory segmentation and inventory optimization. 

http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/5965-RA-inventory-management-capital.asp

Tech companies dominate AMR Research rankings of the top supply chains holding 4 out of the top 5 spots (1. Apple 2. Dell 3. P&G 4. IBM 5. Cisco).  AMR's rankings are a weighted average of peer opinions, AMR opinion, Return on Assests, Inventory Turns and Revenue Growth.  You can read the entire report below.

http://www.amrresearch.com/Content/View.aspx?compURI=tcm:7-43469