Supply Chain Process Benchmarking Using a Self-Assessment Maturity Grid

Competitive advantage is more and more determined by the ability to respond to customer requirements. Research has shown that a well-organised supply chain that can meet these requirements is crucial to firm performance (2006; Ramdas & Spekman 2000; Spekman et al. 1998). Top performance in supply chain management will result into success at the organisational level (Green Jr et al. 2008). More than ever it is important to know what drives performance in a supply chain. As a result, many companies have reverted to benchmarking their supply chain activities. Benchmarking can be defined as a search for industry best practices that lead to superior performance (Camp 1989). Looking outwards to other companies enables companies to “ learn from others and achieve quantum leaps in performance that otherwise could take years to achieve through internal incremental achievements” (Van Landeghem & Persoons 2001: 254). Such quantum leaps are often necessary to stay ahead of competition. Benchmarking is therefore more and more of strategic importance. Benchmarking often consists of comparing performance outcomes with the outside world and the difference between the figures is considered the gap to close in the near future. However, comparing just figures bears certain dangers. Traditional approaches such as benchmarking lagging measures may be unreliable in rapidly changing business environments (Bourne et al. 2000). Furthermore, benchmarking first requires an understanding of processes benchmarked (Voss et al. 1994) and that is often not the case in traditional benchmarking approaches. Well functioning processes are a strategic asset for a company (Hammer 1990): they are crucial to achieving high performance levels and thus to achieve lasting competitive advantage. However, process benchmarking research, which focuses on finding and comparing process practices, largely remains descriptive with a focus on describing practices that successful companies have in place (Davies & Kochhar 2002). They provide companies with limited guidance in target setting as well as developing a roadmap how to get to these targets. In this paper we focus on benchmarking processes through maturity models and we develop a maturity model that can be used as a standard to compare processes across companies, set targets and define growth paths. Recent literature identified a need to develop such models that can be used as a standard to compare different companies within a branch (Lockamy III et al. 2008). The concept of process maturity proposes that a process has a lifecycle that is assessed by the extent to which the process is explicitly defined, managed, measured and controlled