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Kinaxis Benchmarking Service

Get real-time industry benchmarking

How does your company's supply chain perform against the leaders in your industry? There's never been an easier way to get a quick answer to that question. The Kinaxis Benchmarking Service enables you to determine if you're on the right course — and where your course needs to be corrected — at no cost to you.

The service provides a wealth of information to companies interested in comparing their supply chain performance against multiple companies and across various metrics.

What can you do with this service?

• Conduct an immediate competitive comparison against a specific list of companies selected from an up-to-date database of more than 40,000 public companies in manufacturing sectors. Or, group companies based on categories of peers, customers and suppliers.
• Rank 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.
• With a few clicks of the mouse, create customized benchmark reports and elect to receive dashboard results directly via email on a monthly basis.
• If your company is privately held, you can manually and confidentially enter your metrics into the system to set up comparisons.

What's the value?

• Get meaningful benchmark results quickly, easily and at no charge.
• Understand how other organizations are performing on the metrics that mean the most to you.
• Identify performance improvement areas for your business.
• Track short-term and long-term performance trends for your peers, customers and suppliers.

How do you get started?

• The Kinaxis Benchmarking Service is being offered at no cost to any registered member of the free Supply Chain Expert Community.
• Register as a community member and then visit the Supply Chain sub-community to log in to the benchmarking service.

"In this widely competitive and volatile economy, understanding how you are performing against others can be a critical piece of intelligence. While this type of information may be generally available, the process to compile it, calculate the metrics and graph it out is extensive; we offer a ready-to-view service that can provide immediate insight. We hope individuals will take advantage of this."

John Sicard, chief operating officer, Kinaxis

Why is benchmarking critical to the financial success of your business?
Simply stated, you can't improve upon processes that you don't measure. Since 2004, AMR Research (now part of Gartner) has published a list of the top 25 supply chains. Key to AMR's evaluation of the top 25 is a benchmarking exercise using financial and operational metrics. The majority of companies in the supply chain top 25 have consistently outperformed their peers in terms of market capitalization and share price performance.

AMR promotes the approach of "Assess, Diagnose, Correct" to benchmarking. The Kinaxis Benchmarking Service is a great tool for assessing your company's overall competitiveness and diagnosing those parts of the supply chain which are your greatest advantage or disadvantage.

At the "Assess" level, there can be no greater measure of supply chain success than cash-to-cash. This measures the efficiency with which purchased raw material is converted to cash through the sale of finished goods to customers. When discussing ways of improving supply chain efficiencies, analysts often refer to working capital reductions. Being able to compare your company's working capital ratio to your competitors' or peers' gives an indication of your competitive advantage or disadvantage.

At the "Diagnose" level, you should include a number of margin calculations, including gross margin and operating margin. As with cash-to-cash, they do give significant insight into the relative importance of building products versus selling products and developing products. Inventory measures — such as such as inventory turns, days of raw material, work in progress and finished goods — should also be brought to this level to determine where any problems lie.

Metrics only have relevance when compared and tracked over time. The comparison tells you where you are, and the trend over time tells you where you are going. Therefore, it becomes critical to benchmark your supply chain against your competitors' to achieve an understanding of where your company is competitive. If you are gaining on the competition, where is your edge and how can you further maximize it? If you are losing ground to your competitors, where are the areas for improvement?

Without a doubt, detailed operational metrics are important, but only within the context of where your company wants to compete and how your company compares over time to your competition. As AMR promotes, first assess your supply chain, diagnose what are the biggest issues, and then drill down into the corrective actions.