Benchmarking of logistic value chains

WirtscConsidering the increasing volatility of the markets and the growing complexity of products and production structures, it is an ever-greater challenge for many companies to keep their inventories at a low level.

Especially when considering logistic networks, transparency over inventory drivers is crucial to control complexity. Efficient inventory management is essential to be able to react appropriately to the volatile market environment.

In business practice, value chains are usually highly complex, which makes it difficult to map them using uniform performance indicators. The identification of suitable key performance indicators and drivers is a prerequisite for measuring the performance of the value chain concerning inventory management. Since the isolated view of the performance of a value chain has only a limited significance, a comparison with other value chains is meaningful. The goal of such benchmarking is to be able to evaluate and compare the drivers of the inventories of different value chains. Based on this, one's performance can be assessed and measures for improving one's performance can be identified.

The project aims to develop an efficient benchmarking methodology to be able to evaluate and compare the performance of value chains. This will then be used to identify drivers for inventory reduction in logistics networks.

With the development of an evaluation method, it will be possible to map the value chain through the decisive performance criteria and the associated driver variables. The goal of the methodology to be developed is the development of measures based on a quick and meaningful overview of an entire production or logistics network.

Due to the increasing complexity and distribution of value-adding activities, performance evaluation and comparison of different actors is an increasing challenge.

The benchmarking of the collected data should serve to identify the drivers for inventory to subsequently develop measures for efficient and effective inventory management.

Project Leader: Cora Bogusch

On request, we will gladly send you an excerpt from the research report “Benchmarking of logistic value chains”.