Collaborative Transportation Management

9. Measuring Results

Table of Contents

As Yogi Berra said, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." Clearly, for CTM to work, a detailed roadmap to success is required. In other words, measuring performance is essential in guiding the collaborative relationships. The measures themselves must be agreed upon, defined, understood, prioritized, gathered consistently, and shared with collaborative partners.

Table 9-1 lists key performance indicators (KPIs) of logistics management that are likely to be affected by CTM. To understand the relationship between operational activities and strategic imperatives, the measures should be related to the business case for CTM. In other words, if inventory reduction is a significant driver of CTM, inventory levels and measures of service reliability should serve as focal points of assessment. Improvements in these measures should correlate very closely with the desired outcome, reduced inventory levels. It's in this regard that prioritizing measures is important. Given an array of measures, which ones are critical to the success of CTM in the eyes of all participants in the collaboration? Not all measures are equally important nor is there a single set of measures that should serve as the focus for any given CTM initiative.

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