Supply Chain Competitive Advantage is achieved when customer expectations are consistently met and regularly exceeded. Aggressive competition and escalating operating cost for labor, facilities, equipment, fuel, systems, and insurance demand a continuous improvement process that begins with logistics operations excellence founded on best practices.
Achieving best practices in logistics operations is a fundamental requirement for the winning enterprise. Creating the path forward to achieve best practices is a four-step process providing our customer with an in-depth analysis of current operations, relevant benchmarking, gap and risk/benefit analyses and specific recommendations to improve logistics operations.
Business and Logistics Strategy
- Define the business and customer requirements creating a competitive advantage.
- Define and quantify the value of the competitive advantage.
- Create operational objectives in terms of the current capability and relative costs.
Current Logistics Operations Baseline
- Examine logistics operations, organization structure, key processes, enabling tools and technology, and key performance indicators.
- Collect, organize, and analyze financial, historical production, inventory, shipment, and productivity data.
- Observe logistics operations from management and operator perspectives, including interviews with key personnel in each function.
- Assess interactions with external environments including customers, suppliers, manufacturing sites, maintenance contractors and other external suppliers.
- Interview the key business partners for impact of operations on external suppliers and customers.
- Prepare a SWOT analysis of the baseline conditions.
- Relevant Benchmarking
- Analyze the current logistics baseline identifying the relevant categories for benchmarking.
- Identify documented sources for leading practices in logistics and supply chain.
- Develop benchmarking questions to surveys a relevant cross section of industry respondents.
- Collect and catalog the benchmarking data identifying best practice for relevant categories.
- Prepare a side-by-side comparison between the current baseline and benchmarked best practices.
- Identify gaps between the current baseline and benchmarked best practices.
Path Forward Recommendations
- Assess the risks and benefits associated with the status quo versus best practice.
- Identify key opportunities for improvement.
- Describe recommendations and tactics to close the gap for key opportunities.
- Develop the path forward plan to achieve excellence in logistics.