Lora Cecere, the Supply Chain Shaman, is one of my favorite writers about supply chain issues. She’s always right on target with ideas and metrics that aid companies in the pursuit of supply chain improvements. And she’s the essence of simplicity; it’s never that complicated to do, though the ideas may embody complex interactions and reactions.
This article is an example. Lora and her assistant, Alex, put together some orbit charts to show how firms performed against the industry standard.
It’s a great piece of work. In the figure above, you can see that Lenovo is doing well on Inventory Turns, though not so hot on Operating Margin. And the recent trend is toward boosting margins but reducing inventory turns. The great thing about Lora’s charts is how they constructed the comparable business dataset to show us this comparison. Read the article for some details.
For those of you who don’t know about Orbit Charts, they are essentially connected scatterplots, with the connections covering a time dimension, so we see how the pattern changes over time. They are easy to make with most graphics software.
The Supply Chain Shaman’s analysis of the Gartner top 25 Award Winners is worth pursuing. It shows that there is more than one way to achieve supply chain and operational excellence.
Supply Chain and Logistics 