Supply-Chain Council launches no-cost benchmarking service for members

Manufacturing News, Source : The Manufacturer US
Published : 19 Mar 2007 21:56

March 19, 2007 – The Supply-Chain Council (SCC) today announced SCORmarkSM, a no-cost benchmarking portal based on the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR®) Model.

The Supply-Chain Council, an international not-for-profit industry association, in alliance with APQC, a global resource for open standards benchmarking, now provides access to confidential SCOR model benchmarking for its members.

This new market introduction provides global benchmarking insights to set reasonable performance goals, calculate performance gaps, and develop company-specific roadmaps for supply chain competitive success as a part of Supply-Chain Council membership benefits. Information on the SCORmark service, including portal access and benchmarking examples, may be found at www.supply-chain.org/cs/benchmarking.

"The SCORmark product was built to improve the business value of the Supply-Chain Council membership. It supports and integrates seamlessly into the analyze phase of the SCOR model resulting in a benchmark report highlighting where an organization stands against selected peer groups," said SCC Board Chair Thomas Phelps. “Through the use of the SCORmark product, our members are now able to use the defined metrics in the SCOR model to set corporate strategy and accurately analyze performance gaps.”

Over the past month more than 10 organizations have successfully participated in beta testing of the survey to determine goals and metrics most critical to their organizations including supply chain reliability, responsiveness, flexibility, cost and asset management. The output is a report detailing gaps between current state and desired performance targets including hard to measure metrics like flexibility and agility. The APQC database is a confidential, third-party repository for the data allowing Supply-Chain Council members to collect, validate, and report benchmarking data with analysis tools for best practices information. Upon global rollout, organizations can expect to receive reports within two to three days after survey validation. SCORmark removes cost barriers for Supply-Chain Council members to obtain benchmark data, resulting in tremendous costs savings.

“SCORmark benchmarking is focused and efficient. We completed the benchmarking in just two hours as much of the data was easily accessible from our internal reports and the survey provided the right amount of instruction,” noted Mary Muth, program manager with McCormick and Company and a SCORmark beta tester. “Securing a custom benchmark report that compares the metrics we deem important to other like companies will bring tremendous value to our SCOR implementation.”

According to W.L. (Skip) Grenoble, executive director and senior research associate at the Center for Supply Chain Research at Penn State University, "Our research has found that benchmarking is important to the development and refinement of supply chain strategies, yet can be a challenge to implement. The new web portal resource offered by the Supply-Chain Council and APQC addresses this issue. It is based on SCOR metrics and should greatly improve access to meaningful, comparative supply chain performance data.”

IBM sponsored the portal creation and contributed supply chain expertise to the development of the SCORmark service as part of its ongoing support for open standards performance metrics. APQC, IBM, and dozens of other firms formed the Open Standards Benchmarking CollaborativeSM for organizations to benchmark using common terms, definitions and metrics to gain more accurate benchmarking results across industries and geographies.

“With SCORmark, Supply-Chain Council members are able to dramatically shorten the benchmarking cycle time and receive a no-cost benchmarking report that has traditionally cost tens of thousands of dollars. SCORmark pinpoints where organizations should focus to achieve their competitive strategy, and as a result, helps members implement SCOR faster and with greater impact,” said Lisa Higgins, chief operating officer for APQC.

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