Analyst Insight: Key to driving performance and achieving your business strategy is choosing KPIs that clearly align with that strategy. This usually involves identifying three or four areas where the company needs to excel, and then defining a "balanced scorecard" of metrics that shows progress toward the business goals, as well as the trade-offs necessary to achieve those goals. - Rodger Howell, Principal, PwC's Strategy&; Derrick Austring, Director, PwC's Strategy&

The English language is full of potentially polarizing statements. But few are more likely to inspire mixed feelings among DC professionals than some facsimile of this: "Our facility is getting a labor management system."

Supply Chain Management is a "tale of two cities", Leader City and Laggard City. Residents of Leader City, according to benchmarks from APQC, outperform their median competitors with an overwhelming cost and performance advantage. As you navigate the journey to Leader City, at some point, you are going to have to obtain management commitment as evidenced by the fact that we've all been to dozens of case study presentations at conferences over the years. What do they all have in common? You have to have management commitment to be successful. What they never tell you is how to get it! Here's one of the secrets to gaining management commitment that Rich Sherman reveals in his new book. Material excerpted from Supply Chain Transformation: Practical Roadmap to Best Practice Results, by Richard Sherman, 2012. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

For a new report on supply chain excellence, an assistant and I waded through spreadsheet after spreadsheet of data for the last three weeks and contrasted the progress of the high-tech, consumer products, food, pharmaceutical and industrial industries. The storyline of the report is that ONLY the high-tech industry is making progress on what I call the Supply Chain Effective Frontier - effectively balancing progress on growth, profitability, cycles and complexity. The rest of the industries are either stuck or moving backwards. Consumer packaged goods, food and chemical manufacturers are stuck and pharmaceutical and industrial companies are losing ground and moving backwards.