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. 

I wrote in June about how there is tremendous interest in transportation procurement tools since companies are looking for the opportunity to reduce costs given the tough ecomomic conditions.  I recently read a report that cites that Transportation Procurement remains hot and shippers are putting more of their freight spend out to bid with the savings averaging 12%. 

Transportation procurement does not require a large software investment and can be ideally managed with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that automates and standardizes the procurement process. Companies generally utilize a transportation procurement tool at a tactical level where the focus is on a select number of lanes instead the entire network.  There are a number of SaaS vendors in the marketplace including i2, JDA, LeanLogistics, Manhattan Associates and MercuryGate. 

In this Supply Chain Digest interview with Hal Feuchtwanger, Managing Director, Global Logistics at i2, he discusses some of the key business drivers in the transportation industry as well as the growth in adoption of on-demand solutions in the supply chain technology space. A key point discussed is that flexibility and agility are critical for survival in today's rapidly changing and challenging business environment.

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