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

I read an article from Dan Gilmore of SC Digest that discusses how companies are looking for new ideas on how to use their supply chains in dealing with the downturn and how to prepare for the recovery.  Companies should consider work on projects designed to improve their supply chains so that they are more competitive as the economy improves.  Areas that companies are looking to make improvements include supply chain network redesign, supply chain reorganization, SKU-rationalization projects, aligning metrics with people and the way you deliver value to the customer.  Additionally, it makes sense to eliminate silos of optimization in an organization so that there is a holitic view and decisions are made with the entire supply chain in mind instead of optimization of one area at the expense of another. 

http://www.scdigest.com/ASSETS/ON_TARGET/09-08-31-1.PHP?CID=2682