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MEASURING SUPPLY CHAIN PERFORMANCE AND COSTS

Senior materiel managers in the Department of Defense (DoD) oversee the largest supply chains in the world. The diverse sources of supply, customer locations, storage activities, and transportations channels, as well as the multitude of systems managing these entities, pose a major challenge to monitoring performance and cost. To meet that challenge, the Supply Chain Integration Office (SCI), managed by the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Logistics and Materiel Readiness, DUSD(L&MR), wanted to develop web-based tools that would not only display current, accurate measurements of performance and cost, but would allow users to drill down to research trends and anomalies. SCI selected LMI to perform this task.

Working with SCI, LMI employed a balanced scorecard strategy to select the metrics appropriate for DoD supply chains. Many of them conform to the metrics in the commercial Supply Chain Operational Reference (SCOR) model, while others are unique to DoD. We developed six information tools, which we now host in a web-based environment.

The main tool―simply named the SCI Metrics Tool―graphically displays measurements over time for the selected metrics and has some drilldown capabilities to investigate trends and anomalies. The other five tools were specifically designed to drill down into metrics using querying features to produce user-defined graphics and statistical reports. Because of the tens of millions of records involved in some metrics, we teamed with SmartArrays, whose software engine has the advanced capability to quickly query huge databases to render an array of statistics relevant to order fulfillment times.

Access to the tools can be requested through the government website for SCI.