Share Knowledge and Experience in a Supply Chain Peer Group
Develop business improvement opportunities by sharing and exchanging knowledge and ideas. To find out more about how supply chain peer groups help you optimise performance, talk to a benchmarking success consultant today.
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How We Can Help
Why Join a Supply Chain Peer Group?
The businesses that improve fastest aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated systems. They’re the ones that know what good actually looks like because they’ve seen it somewhere else.
That’s the whole idea behind our supply chain peer groups. The concept is straightforward. We bring together a small group of businesses from non-competing industries, create a structured environment for sharing performance data, operational experience and ideas, and let the cross-pollination do its work. What tends to happen is that someone in the room has already solved the problem you’ve been wrestling with for six months. And vice versa.
Business Improvement Groups
What a Peer Group Actually Is
We’ve been running Business Improvement Groups, or BIGs as we call them, for years. A BIG is a group of typically six to eight businesses, all from different, non-competing industries, who meet regularly to share supply chain performance data and operational experience. The non-competing part matters. It’s what makes genuine openness possible. Nobody’s worried about handing an advantage to a rival. So the conversations tend to be honest in a way that industry forums and conferences rarely are.
Each meeting is facilitated by a Benchmarking Success consultant. We manage the structure, keep the discussion productive, and make sure the benchmarking data is being interpreted correctly. But the real value comes from the group itself. The scope of what a BIG benchmarks is broad. We’re looking at the full supply chain picture, including:
Supply chain costs
Warehousing, transport, inventory carrying costs, and total supply chain cost as a percentage of revenue, broken down properly rather than lumped together.
Service performance
On-time delivery, order accuracy, fill rates, and customer service metrics, compared against the group and against broader best practice benchmarks.
Inventory management
Turns, days on hand, obsolescence rates, and the relationship between inventory levels and service performance.
What Warehouse Benchmarking Typically Uncovers
If we're sharing our performance data, how do we know it stays confidential?
The data shared within the group is anonymised in reporting. Members see their own data in full and see other members’ data in aggregate. Individual company names are never attached to specific figures outside the group itself.
How do we know the other businesses in the group are genuinely comparable to ours?
We put a fair amount of thought into group composition. The goal isn’t to find businesses that are identical to yours, it’s to find businesses running supply chains of similar complexity and scale, regardless of what they’re actually selling. A business moving high volumes of low-value products has more in common operationally with another high-volume operation than it does with a low-volume, high-value business in the same industry.
How often does the group meet?
Typically quarterly, though the cadence can be adjusted depending on what the group agrees. The quarterly rhythm tends to work well as it’s frequent enough to maintain momentum but not so frequent that it becomes a burden on already busy people.
What if our supply chain is quite specific or unusual?
I’ve heard that from almost every business I’ve ever worked with. And in almost every case, the fundamentals are more similar to other operations than people expect. The specifics differ. The underlying dynamics rarely do.
How long does it take to see value from the group?
Most members find the first meeting useful in ways they didn’t expect. The data comparison alone tends to surface things people had suspected but couldn’t confirm. The deeper value, like the relationships, the shared problem-solving, builds over time.
The Process
Joining a Supply Chain Peer Group
The thing about peer groups is that they work best when the composition is right. So the first conversation we’d have is about whether a BIG is actually the right fit for your business — what you’re trying to improve, where you think your gaps are, and whether the timing makes sense.
If it is a fit, we’d talk about which group makes sense for you, or whether we’d be looking at forming a new one.
What You'll Get
Regular benchmarking against a genuine peer group
Quarterly performance data comparison against businesses running supply chains of similar complexity and scale. Not industry averages. Actual businesses, measured the same way you are.
Honest conversations you can't have anywhere else
Because the group is non-competing, the level of openness tends to be genuinely unusual. People share what’s working and what isn’t in a way that simply doesn’t happen in industry forums or conferences.
Facilitated structure that keeps it productive
Every meeting is facilitated by a Benchmarking Success consultant. We make sure the conversation is structured, the data is being used properly, and that every member leaves with something concrete.
A network that compounds over time
The benchmarking data is valuable from day one. The relationships and shared knowledge that develop over months and years are, if I’m honest, usually worth more.