In brief

The Supply Chain Council (SCC) is partnering with Houston, Texas-based APQC, a global best practices and benchmarking organization, for a new online benchmarking service to SCC members. IBM is underwriting the program. The online service seeks to reduce the benchmarking cycle from as long as one year down to weeks or days.

"The metrics we are using to characterize supply chain best practices have been developed collaboratively by SCC over the last 10 years," says Joe Francis, SCC chief technology officer. "APQC will manage the data and verification, and ensure reliability."