The performance of Supply Chains

The Covid-19 crisis served as a reminder of the crucial importance of logistics and supply chains. The quality of States' response to this unprecedented crisis clearly depended on the performance of the health logistics and medical supply chains that governments succeeded (or failed) in putting in place. The most advanced countries were those that succeeded in making masks available, increasing resuscitation bed capacity, isolating cases and tracing contacts, rapidly organizing tests on the right people, vaccinating the population as quickly as possible once the vaccines had been received, and so on.

This example illustrates the importance of high-performance supply chains, whatever the type of organization in question: business, public service, association, etc. But what does it actually mean to have an "efficient" supply chain and logistics? Given that a supply chain in fact brings together several independent entities, from whose point of view can logistics and the supply chain be qualified as "efficient"? What are the main indicators used to measure this performance? What are the main tools for improving supply chain performance? These are the questions this article seeks to answer, in four parts.

The first begins by clarifying what is meant by the notion of supply chain performance. First, it clearly defines what a supply chain consists of. It then points out that two key indicators can be used to assess supply chain performance: logistics costs and logistics service levels.

The second looks at how the supply chain contributes to organizational performance. It shows how the supply chain impacts performance on the three dimensions of sustainable development (economic, ecological and societal). It emphasizes that the supply chain has an impact on the performance of any organization.

The third part looks at how an organization can improve the performance of its supply chain. It shows that the objective is for an organization to build interfaces with upstream and downstream players, and to promote a global vision of the chain. It also stresses that the performance targeted must obviously be adapted to the organization's strategy.

Finally, the fourth section discusses the collective performance of supply chains. Supply chains are intertwined, and the performance of one organization's supply chain is not independent of that of its competitors. The challenge is to call on logistics service providers and standardization associations to develop mutualization and standardization practices between chains, and to interconnect them in a circular economy perspective.

Finally, in this article, we will use the terms logistics and supply chain as synonyms. While some consider...