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

Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors have been gaining momentum due to their lower costs and quicker implementations.  SaaS vendors offer an on demand software deployment that allows IT resources to focus on more strategic initiatives rather spending time and money managing expensive hardware.  SaaS and cloud computing also offer improved energy efficiency and sustainability benefits.