InspiringBusinessPerformance

How to provide best-in-class service and halve supply chain costs

An Executive Guide to Performance Benchmarking

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A healthy supply chain is fundamental for business success. If not a revelation, it is a realisation that has well and truly dawned for companies of the recession generation. Whilst the world has certainly got much smaller, it has also become more complex, which means a real understanding of your supply chain is ever more critical. Making big decisions without full understanding of your supply chain is obviously a very risky business. Performance benchmarking allows

you to identify precisely where you are – in absolute terms, and in relation to your competitors and peers – so you can then plan where you want to be, and how to get there. And the benefits need little explanation: improved customer service; increased productivity and efficiency; reduced cost, inventory and waste; lower capital requirement; enhanced portfolio development and management; reduced environmental impact; and improved competitive advantage.

Measure to improve

Whatever the industry, an optimised supply chain can be the difference between those organisations that succeed and those that do not. But if you don’t know how well you are performing, or what best-in-class performance looks like, how do you know where you can improve, or by how much? Ignorance is not bliss; in fact it’s a very dangerous practice. If your competitor’s supply chain is delivering better service than yours, you’ll find

out eventually but unless you take the initiative, it might be the hard way. Critically, benchmarking your supply chain performance will allow you to identify performance gaps and provide a financial evaluation of the gains that can be made off the back of improvement action. And you can expect the potential savings to be many times the cost of benchmarking itself; gains typically run to £millions.

Understanding the opportunity is the first stage of realising the potential

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Oliver Wight Performance Benchmarking provides both a quantitative and qualitative assessment of your supply chain performance; it isn’t just a set of numbers. It allows you to identify opportunities for improving customer service at the same time as dramatically reducing supply chain costs. By

quantifying your current supply chain performance and comparing it to best-in-class, you will see precisely where and how big, the improvement opportunities are. With recommendations for short, medium and long-term improvement actions, you can chart your journey to supply chain excellence.

What is Performance Benchmarking?

Oliver Wight Performance Benchmarking is an integrated component of the Oliver Wight Proven Path methodology. You can measure your performance at the very start of your journey to performance excellence and use it to validate your progress against the Oliver Wight Class

A milestones along the way. What’s more, you can continue to monitor your performance long after you’ve achieved the coveted Oliver Wight Class A standard, to ensure you continue to retain your competitive edge.

These are the things you should expect to be able to do:

• Improve customer service

• Reduce supply chain costs

• Optimise your supply chain

• Identify performance gaps

• Quantify ‘the size of the prize’ - the real financial benefits you can gain

• Identify how to deliver the perfect order - the ultimate measure of customer service

• Shorten your cash cycle

• Track your improvement over time

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There are a number of very good reasons to benchmark yourself against the competition but chief among them is establishing where the bar really is. Of course if you aspire to be the best, you need to know what the best looks like. To use a simple sporting analogy, if you intend to be the fastest man in the world, you know you have to beat Usain Bolt’s 100m time of 9.58 seconds. It is an unambiguous goal.

Benchmarking your performance is critical if you want to defend or improve your competitive position. And of course, once you have made gains, it then becomes a useful sales tool - being able to demonstrate you are one of the top performers in your sector has got to be good for business.

If you define your key measures of business performance without benchmarking, how will you know what

targets to set against these measures? Many organisations operate comfortably on the basis they are improving year on year but it’s no use settling for 10 per cent growth, if your competitors are expanding at 25 per cent, or they are operating with a lower cost base and will eventually overhaul you.

Oliver Wight Performance Benchmarking places a different lens on your organisation from an external perspective. Business leaders typically ask their people ‘what can we do to improve?’ But with benchmarking, the question becomes, ‘what will it take to become best-in-class?’ That establishes a very different organisational motivation and your people are inspired to come up with initiatives that may well take you by surprise.

Why do it?

FIG 1. Supply chain costs as % of gross sales

This chart shows that irrespective of industry sector, organisations providing best-in-class service have half the average supply chain costs.

Sup

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as %

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Industry sector

Achieving excellent customer service is an imperative in all organisations, so to improve supply chain performance, the focus has to be on service rather than cost reduction; the former will lead to the latter. This may seem counter-intuitive as it is often assumed you have to increase costs in order to improve

customer service. However, the evidence is incontrovertible - supply chain costs in best-in-class companies are half the average. What’s more, if you provide better service than your competition, you can charge more for that service, so it becomes a virtuous circle.

Providing best-in-class service can halve your supply chain costs

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The Oliver Wight team will work with you to establish a data set of organisations, which match the profile of your supply chain – by industry, supply chain structure, company size and location, and so on. They can be your direct competitors and/or those with similar supply chains, whether or not they are in the same industry sector. Then, using your own data, you record your performance against the 128 criteria in our unique online assessment tool, the Oliver Wight Customer Order Fulfilment Survey, or COFS. This allows us to create a deep-dive evaluation of your

supply chain performance relative to your specified data set.

The 128 criteria against which your supply chain is assessed, provide the information to determine your performance relative to the global standards established by the Supply Chain Council’s SCOR® model, and using the principle of delivering ‘the perfect order’, the Oliver Wight COFs tool evaluates your performance for order accuracy, inventory availability, delivered in full, on time (DIFOT), customer acceptance and accuracy of invoicing.

How does it work?

• Your supply chain benchmarked against the world’s best known organisations

• Your performance compared to your peers and best-in-class

• Analysis tailored to your industry sector and/or supply chain type

• Cost and service analysed by individual supply chain functions

• Hard data and demonstrable metrics

• Improvement plan with key recommendations for short, medium and long term action

• The size of the prize quantified

You record your performance against the 128 criteria in our unique online assessment tool

Once the results of your Customer Order Fulfilment Survey have been assessed and validated by the Oliver Wight team, you will receive your Performance Improvement Report (PIR) - a detailed 50- to 100-page analysis of your end-to-end supply chain performance, compared to your peers and the best-in-class from your chosen data set.

On top of the hard data, your PIR will make recommendations for improvement action for the short, medium and long term. And crucially, the report will calculate the ‘size of the prize’; the financial gains you can make through the performance improvement identified. The report will be presented to you by an Oliver Wight consultant, so the findings can be openly debated and an informed roadmap to improvement developed.

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Oliver Wight are recognised globally as the pioneers of Sales and Operations Planning and thought-leaders for Integrated Business Planning (advanced S&OP). Over the past 40 years, we have worked with hundreds of companies - including some of the world’s best-known brands - helping them integrate their business processes and optimise their supply chains. So we have an unrivalled database of organisations for

you to benchmark your supply chain performance against. This means you can compare your own supply chain with those in your industry sector, and/or with similar supply chain structures. Our database is growing every day and refreshed regularly, so your performance is measured only against supply chains operating in the latest economic and market conditions.

Where does the data come from?

1. The data used has been collected over many years; it is comprehensive, robust and regularly refreshed

2. The Oliver Wight database includes nearly 1,000 organisations from across the globe

3. Performance Benchmarking is tailored to your organisation - the analysis is made against organisations with comparable supply chains to your own, and you can specify which types of organisations you want to be benchmarked against, although of course, we never reveal the names of the companies in the dataset you have selected

Automotive and machinery Building Distribution Food and beverage 3PL Exporters Importers Utilities General manufacturing

Engineering Retail suppliers Computers and electronics Office equipment Industrial suppliers Retailers Pharmaceutical and hospitals Chemicals and plastics Clothing

Example supply chain data sets

4. You enter your own data so the results are based on your own real life and current information

The Performance Improvement Report (PIR)

Your Performance Improvement Report (PIR) provides a detailed evaluation of your supply chain performance, relative to those in your chosen data set. The following pages show just some of the things it includes.

What do I get?

Oliver Wight Performance Benchmarking is a must for any organisation that wants to improve its supply chain performance. It is suitable for any business in any

sector, as long as it has a complete end-to-end supply chain system, from order to delivery. It is most useful for mid- to large-sized companies.

Who is it for?

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At the centre of your PIR report is an analysis of the relationship between your supply chain costs (your cash-to-cash cycle, supply chain management cost as a percentage of sales, stock turns etc.) and level of service to customers (DIFOT, inventory accuracy, and perfect

order ratio). This is mapped against all the other organisations in your selected supply chain group, so you see not only your own performance but also how it compares to your competitors (i.e. those in your chosen dataset).

This chart shows the performance of Company X relative to the organisations within its chosen dataset. The dotted line denotes the trajectory of ‘best-fit’ performance of service related to supply chain costs for the group dataset. For Company X, there is improvement potential for both service and cost.

X-axis: Service – driven by SIFOT; DIFOT, inventory accuracy; perfect order ratio etc.Y-axis: Cost – driven by cash-to-cash cycle; supply chain cost silos; stock turns etc.

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1. Strategic cost and service relationship

FIG 2. Strategic cost and service relationship

Dark blue area outlines the spread of other supply chains’ positions on the chart

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2. Functional cost benchmarking

This compares your performance against your chosen dataset in the six key functional cost areas of:

• Warehouse fixed costs including insurance, depreciation, rent, rates, outside

storage cost etc

• Materials handling equipment (maintance, leasing costs)

• Variable costs including management staff, overtime and casual labour, postage,

telephone, fax and power etc

• All information technology costs; costs of third party provider, if relevant

This example shows the ‘warehouse function’ performance of company X in terms of the cost of the warehouse function as a percentage of gross sales. ‘Gross sales’ includes the revenue earned by the business. Some of these costs are listed below.

FIG 3. Functional cost benchmarking

Purchasing administration Inventory management Inventory holding

Warehousing Outbound transportation Customer service

The performance of Company X is shown by the blue bar (3- <4%). 85% of supply chains in the comparison group have lower costs than Company X for the warehouse function and only 6% have lower costs.

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4. Gross margin and turn/earn index

Business profitability is determined by many factors. One critical trade-off is the margin earned by each SKU and how often that SKU turns over. For example an antiques dealer traditionally has very low stock turns, so needs high margin products to be profitable. In contrast a grocery retailer has very fast stock turnover and can be profitable with low product margins.

The turn/earn index (T&E) is a gross measure of profitability, and can be for an item, line, category or the business as a whole; it measures the combined effects of gross margin profitability and the

quantity of inventory being held/turned through the business – so, if an exporter targets a T&E of 1,000, this equates to 25 stock turns with an average gross margin of 40%, or 40 stock turns with gross margin of 25%. T&E allows you to identify stock that is not covering its cost, so you can either increase margin - or if that’s not possible, reduce inventory - to ensure profitability. As a general rule: the larger the T&E, the better, and a low T&E indicates a problem. On the other hand, if T&E is too high, the item, line, category or business, could well be vulnerable to competition.

The grey arrows show where Company X achieves parity, or close to parity, with its peer group and the yellow arrows indicate where there is a significant improvement opportunity. For Company X, ‘Perfect Order Probability’ is below the average (‘Parity’) for its peer group and well below best-in-class (‘Advantage’) in its group. The company has a particular weakness in ‘inventory availability’, which is recorded at just 80%.

FIG 4. Perfect order analysis

Perfect order analysis is the ultimate measure of customer satisfaction. Using your own data, your ‘Perfect Order Probability’ score factors order accuracy, inventory availability, warehouse

service, transportation, customer order acceptance and invoice accuracy, to provide a real statistical measurement of your customer service, compared to your peers.

3. Perfect order analysis

The blue flags denote the performance of Company X. It has an excellent ‘in full’ delivery performance of 99 per cent, but ‘on time’ delivery and ‘stock turns’ are only average (‘Parity’) compared to its competitors.

FIG 5. Supply chain metrics

Oliver Wight Performance Benchmarking provides a forensic analysis of your key supply chain metrics, compared to all the other supply chains in your selected

data set – delivery in full; delivery on time; DIFOT (in-full x on-time); total supply chain management costs; cash-to-cash cycle time; and stock turns.

5. Supply chain metrics

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Client: International food company

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In this real life example of a food manufacturing company, Oliver Wight Performance Benchmarking has identified a potential gain of $8.79 million in supply chain costs, plus a further $2.70 million in other costs, for a single decile improvement in overall supply chain performance.

7. Size of the prize

Your PIR report will show the financial gains which can be made by improving performance by one or two deciles relative to your peers, against each of the key supply chain metrics - from purchasing administration through to customer service. By definition, the gains will depend on the business demographics of your organisation and its current performance, but typically the

potential gains run into £millions. This financialisation makes performance benchmarking a powerful tool in justifying the cost of any improvement activity. Financial people always want to know what the return will be from any investment and Oliver Wight Performance Benchmarking makes that very clear from the outset.

FIG 6. Size of the prize

6. Recommendations for improvement

On top of the hard data analysis, the improvement report makes vital recommendations on how and where to make gains in the short, medium and long term. These are not hypothetical

activities but real actionable proposals, identifying the priorities for process and behaviour change, and the training requirements, as well as the opportunity for quick wins.

The potential gains run into £millions

If you would like to know more about Oliver Wight Performance Benchmarking, please contact us on:

T 01452 397200E email@oliverwight-eame.com

What happens next?

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Oliver Wight EAME LLP

The Willows

The Steadings Business Centre

Maisemore

Gloucester, GL2 8EY

United Kingdom

T: +44 (0)1452 397200

email@oliverwight-eame.com

www.oliverwight-eame.com

Oliver Wight Asia/Pacific

131 Martin Street, Brighton

Victoria 3186, Australia

Oliver Wight Americas

P.O. Box 368, 292 Main Street

New London, NH 03257, USA

Oliver Wight has a 40 year track record of delivering business improvement

to some of the world’s best-known organisations. We believe that sustainable

improvement can only be made through your own people. So unlike other

consultancy firms, we transfer our knowledge to you, which means you can

achieve performance levels and financial results that last.

At the leading edge of management thinking and

practice, our Integrated Business Planning (IBP)

model lies at the heart of our clients’ journey

to outstanding business performance. Oliver

Wight originated Sales and Operations Planning

in the 1980s and IBP can most simply be

described as advanced S&OP; evolving from its

production planning roots over 40 years into the

fully integrated management and supply chain

collaboration process it is today. IBP allows the

senior executive to plan and manage the entire

organisation over a 24 month horizon, aligning

tactical and strategic plans each month and

allocating critical resources to satisfy customers

in the most profitable way.

Inspiring Business Performance

The information contained is proprietary to Oliver Wight International and may not be modified,

reproduced, distributed or utilized in any manner in whole or in part, without the express prior written

permission of Oliver Wight International.