Supply Chain Metrics That Matter will be a series of reports published intermittently throughout the year by Supply Chain Insights LLC. Within the world of Supply Chain Management (SCM), each industry is unique. To help companies understand differences, each report is a deep dive on a different industry.
While we find it useful to understand the evolution of supply chain excellence by comparing industries, we feel that the true stories of supply chain excellence can only be really understood by comparing what happened within a period by peer group. The goal of this series is to share these insights. These reports are intended for you to read, share and use to improve your supply chain decisions.
The average Consumer Products (CP) company is stronger in the execution of supply chain management practices than their retail or pharmaceutical counterparts, but as companies will see in later reports, CP progress has not been equal to that of High-tech and Electronics manufacturers.
CP companies (including both consumer packaged goods (CPG) and food & beverage companies) tend to be marketing-driven. They are struggling to understand the differences between new market-driven, and their well-oiled marketing-driven, supply chains. With a strong legacy in building persuasive marketing programs, the companies have leveraged a global “one-size-fits-all” push-based supply chain strategy. These traditional supply chain management (SCM) definitions have produced supply chains that respond, but don’t sense. They are efficient, but not adaptive. They tend to be long (greater than twenty weeks) with waste pockets between nodes.
The landscape of the industry has been greatly affected by mergers and acquisitions. In the past decade, 57 companies were absorbed into ten. The industry is still digesting this change. While most companies have 150 unique systems, the manufacturers in this industry will often have five times the industry average. Getting to the right data to improve decision making continues to be a challenge.
Supply Chain Metrics That Matter: A Focus on the Consumer Products Industry 25 SEP 2012
1. Supply Chain Metrics That Matter:
A Focus on the Consumer Products Industry
Using Corporate Annual Reports’ Financial Data to
Better Understand Consumer Packaged Goods and
Food & Beverage Supply Chains
9/25/2012
By Abby Mayer
Research Associate
Supply Chain Insights LLC