Purchasing Transformation

That efficent supply chain management can provide a factual competitive edge has been one of the key components of the spend management marketing toolkit but there have been few studies that empirically nail down the reasoning.

Fortunately, Roland Berger’s (in co-operation with WHU, Stanford University and ETH Zürich) recent Global SCM Excellence Study takes the factual approach and offers numbers to convert any disbelievers out there.

The main objective of the study was to analyze the impact of strategic supply chain fit on actual company performance (Roland Berger used ROCE to measure the performance) and what they found was that the companies with a supply chain fit outperformed their competitors by 15,5 percent on average.

Furthermore, the study claims that companies with a supply chain fit also outperform their non-fit competitors on ROA (Return On Assets), sales growth and EBIT margin.

• ROA: Outperformed by 5 percent
• Sales growth: Outperformed by 6,5 percent
• EBIT Margin: Outperformed by 3 percent

All in all, the report is good news for anyone struggling to convince skeptics of just how powerful supply chain management can be in achieving operational and financial excellence.

This entry was posted on April 22, 2009 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Business, Supply Chain, Supply Chain Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.