Lora Cecere and the Supply Chain Insights team hosted their annual Global Summit at the beautiful Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale, AZ. I want to use this space to touch on some of the compelling and leading edge research and topics presented at the summit.
Lora and her team are attacking an area of analytics and performance measurement that has long been left unattended…meaningful performance measurement and comparative indexing across industries. The heart of the index is the Supply Chain Effective Frontier defined by four major components: Growth (Revenue Growth), Profitability (Operating Margin), Cycle (Inventory Turns) and Complexity (Return on Invested Capital). The financial metrics are represented with 20 years of data so the research has exceptional depth.
The primary visualization of performance over time is found in the Orbit Charts representing the intersection of Operating Margin and Inventory Turns. This is an innovative view of time series data and challenges target industries to understand what they are controlling and where control is lacking.
A series of thought provoking concepts also caught my attention. I am only listing them here and present them as the traditional measure versus the meaningful measure (as presented by Lora).
- Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) versus Return on Assets (ROA)
- Vertical Silos versus Horizontal Integration
- Project Decks versus Holistic View of Complex Systems
- Best Practices versus Emerging Practices
For those of you who have been following along you understand I’m a sucker for advanced mathematics and innovative analytics. I also appreciate the efforts of others in the field. It’s important to use this type of information to stay motivated and to continue to innovate.
Stay tuned for my next topic covering an exciting new application of advanced planning on the Cloud!
