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How Do You Benchmark a Supply Chain?
You benchmark in supply chain by planning your activities, collecting quantitative and qualitative data from your own and other organizations, analyzing what you collected, and then adapting your findings to take action. To benchmark a supply chain, it’s important to begin with a clear…
It’s Time To Invest In Logistics Employees
After an especially chaotic few years, change and disruption may feel like the only certainties in supply chain. Along with macrotrends like a global pandemic, geopolitical conflict, and a competitive labor market, new and emerging technologies are continuing to transform the ways in which supply…
Service Level Agreement Mistakes
A service level agreement (SLA) defines the specifications, quality, and cost of a good or service being provided by a supplier to a buyer. SLAs help to provide transparency about what the buyer expects from the supplier and protects all parties in the…
Why Your Customer Service KPIs Are Off-Target
Excellence in customer service is critical for retaining customers and maintaining a competitive advantage in the face of changing expectations. Yet APQC finds that many customer service organizations have picked key performance indicators (KPIs) that are inward-looking, lack customer focus, and…
RPA in Supply Chain: Success Starts With Exceptional Governance
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is often positioned as a game-changing technology that helps organizations achieve cost savings, better process performance, and numerous other benefits. But given all the hype around automation, it’s all too easy to underestimate the amount of time, labor, and…
Supply Chain Sustainability Hits a Road Block
Organizations are facing pressure from multiple sources to ensure that their supply chains are operating in a sustainable manner from end-to-end. Organizations that do not currently track and assess the sustainability of their logistics providers may be left scrambling when Scope 3 disclosure…
Supply Chain’s Greatest Obstacles and Opportunities Now
Supply chains have gained greater visibility over the last few years as the key to ensuring the smooth continuation of operations and the timely delivery of products and services for both businesses and consumers. Supply chain now has more influence among senior leaders. Yet with this recognition…
How Do You Implement A Supply Chain Control Tower?
As part of APQC’s annual research into priorities and challenges for the upcoming year, Marisa Brown conducts a global survey and interviews supply chain stakeholders from various industries and organizations. One of the people she spoke with this year, Stew Stremel, told her about an organization…
Why is Supply Chain Benchmarking Important?
Supply chain benchmarking is important because managers need to: understand how their supply chains compare to competitors’, evaluate “as is” conditions before they can determine what to fix, encourage innovation, compare performance across business units, and leverage data for…
How Do You Manage Supplier Risk? Via Business Continuity Planning
The best time to build a business continuity plan was before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the second-best time is now. Your organization—and especially your procurement team—should be armed with a robust, actionable business continuity plan that they’re continually refining and improving to prepare…