Benchmarking best practices | Developing supply chain differentiation strategy

Business need

  • The strategy team of a leading European mobile telecom operator wanted to evaluate how it could use its supply chain to create a sustainable advantage.
  • It was keen to understand how other industry leaders leveraged certain parts of their supply chains to differentiate their propositions.
  • It wanted to create a better alignment between its supply chain and its overall business strategy to effectively transform its business

To learn from the industry leaders and develop an effective supply chain strategy to transform the business.

The client outlined three key reasons for selecting RocSearch:

  • Our ability to rapidly deploy customised strategy teams with the necessary skills.
  • Our global outlook and exposure in benchmarking international best practice studies.
  • Our extensive experience in advising clients on their supply chain strategies.

Approach and Methodology

  • Our strategic advisory team conducted an in-depth industry-wide study of at least 15 global corporations that had excelled in their businesses by differentiating their supply chains. We included examples of the top five players from the ‘Gartner Supply Chain Top 25’ for 2020.

We presented insightful success stories of global business leaders such as Cisco, Colgate-Palmolive, Johnson &Johnson, Schneider Electric and Nestlé to showcase their best practices related to supply chain operations.

Strategy Service
  • We also captured examples of successful supply chain cost reduction and management strategies, covering the supply chain practices of John Deere, Intel, Starbucks, AGCO, TEREX, Avaya and Sunsweet.
  • In each of the case studies, we shared insights on the company’s initiatives, associated rationale, key differentiation strategies, critical success factors, costs involved, customers’ responses and how these strategies had benefitted each of the companies.

Business Outcomes

  • The learnings from the best practice study helped the client to differentiate its products and processes, and provide wider service options to its customers.
  • The impact analysis enabled the client to re-assess and differentiate its supply chain strategies, which led to a reduction in customer acquisition & service costs, besides reduction in delivery lead times.
  • It also helped improve the client’s inventory management process and increased its agility through greater collaboration with various players in the ecosystem.

By differentiating its supply chain, the client was able to reduce its customer acquisition & service costs, improve inventory management and increase agility.


—Related content

Ready to talk?