The Monthly Metric: End of the Year — and the Road

In 2016, I interviewed Chris Sawchuk over the phone on a chilly spring morning while sitting on the back patio of my Arizona home. As we were concluding the conversation, I asked a final question, not directly related to our topic at hand and more out of personal curiosity.

Sawchuk, principal and global procurement advisory practice leader at The Hackett Group, the Miami-based business consultancy, touched on data and metrics during our discussion. So, I asked about the evolution of advanced analytics in supply management, and if it was comparable to the data explosion in baseball — which I wrote about frequently in my previous life as a sportswriter.

In baseball, advanced data was shaped and molded into new criteria to determine a player’s value — inspiring an Academy Award-nominated film and revolutionizing how the national pastime is played, managed and watched.

“In baseball, we relied on those (basic) statistics all those years because there was no way to get the other stuff, and that was at our fingertips,” he said. “That’s the way it is in (business). What big data and the analytics associated with it are doing is giving us insight and the opportunity to focus on other things that weren’t within our grasp before.”

That interview resulted in one of my first bylines at Institute for Supply Management^® (ISM^®) and, more importantly, inspired a monthly series focused on supply management metrics that involved many interesting subjects and case studies. I interviewed Sawchuk for a number of editions, and many other smart people helped me along the way.

Many Metrics and Miles Covered

This is the 93rd — and last — edition of The Monthly Metric. There have been multiple spaces on the internet devoted to business metrics, and this one has outlived almost all of them. But as a colleague said to me recently, “It seems like you’ve covered all the metrics.”

That might not be true, but I can confidently say we’ve touched on all the important and interesting ones, from the basics to different perspectives on the basics. We tapped internal resources like the ISM^® Report On Business^® and Metrics of Supply Management report by CAPS Research, the Tempe, Arizona-based organization in strategic partnership with Arizona State University and ISM.

As the coronavirus pandemic engulfed the globe in early 2020 and companies put data collection and analysis on hold to scramble for supply, this space offered reviews of critical inventory analytics and risk measurements, plus thoughts from Sawchuk and others on how metrics might change in a new, uncertain era.

We became one of the most popular places on Google to find information on cash-to-cash cycle time. We witnessed sustainability metrics gain importance among organizations and investors. And we regularly reminded that metrics work best when procurement uses them to align with other functions and overall company goals.

What’s Next?

As for the future, we return to baseball, where at least one major-league franchise appears to be tapping the brakes on analytics emphasis, suggesting there’s still a place for more traditional evaluation and scouting practices.

The supply management function trails only finance as the biggest consumer of data in most companies. That trend is unlikely to reverse, or even slow. While data and metrics will always be critical to success, there’s risk of analysis paralysis, simply because of the reams of it available to organizations.

“Technology enhancements and data generation are growing exponentially,” Jim Fleming, CPSM, CPSD, Manager, Product Development and Innovation at ISM, told me last year. “So, companies might always feel like they’re playing catch-up, but the people who come in with the best skill sets have the ability to move fastest and tap into emerging trends. It can be overwhelming, but if you’re waiting for it to slow down, that’s not going to happen. You need people who can run.”

That will be the primary focus of Inside Supply Management^®’s coverage of analytics in the future, especially as companies tap technology like artificial intelligence (AI) to clean and harness data. And as interesting metrics that we haven’t covered before come up, you can bet we’ll dive into them.

Thanks, and See You Down the Road

So, this holiday season, those who spoke with me during this series are forever on The Monthly Metric’s “nice” list. The total is too long to list, but Sawchuk and these who provided their time and insights on multiple occasions deserve appreciation:

• Among the ISM family: Fleming; Kristina Cahill, Report On Business^® and Research Manager; Debbie Fogel-Monnissen, CFO; Nancy LeMaster, MBA, Chair of the ISM Hospital Business Survey Committee; and Geoff Zwemke, Director of Product at CAPS Research
• Brian Barry, president at F. Curtis Barry & Company, a Richmond, Virginia-based warehouse operations and fulfillment consultancy
• Lisa M. Ellram, Ph.D., MBA, C.P.M., Rees Distinguished professor of supply chain management at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio
• Simon Jacobson, vice president of supply chain research at Gartner, the Stamford, Connecticut-based global business research and advisory firm
• Tracey Smith, MBA, MAS, CPSM, president of Numerical Insights LLC, a boutique analytics firm in Williamsville, New York
• Michael Van Keulen, CPO at Coupa, a San Mateo, California-based business spend management technology platform
• Denis Wolowiecki, former Executive Managing Director at CAPS Research.

Since its debut in March 2017, this space has been nothing without the wisdom of our guest experts — and the support of our readers, who have provided suggestions and social-media word of mouth. Thanks for coming along for the ride, and on the long, winding road of supply chain data and analytics, we’ll be sure to intersect again.

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Lisa5201)