Companies are continually finding new ways to get the right goods to the right customers at the right time, and have developed many metrics to measure their performance in these areas.

Most of these metrics show distribution productivity and accuracy are improving over time, which keeps raising the bar for service levels. For example, from 2007 to 2008, companies reduced their average days on hand of finished goods inventory from 35 days to 28, reduced dock-to-dock cycle time by 2.5 hours, and reduced days of sales outstanding from 40 days to 35, all while maintaining 98 percent fill rates, according to the Annual Warehouse Benchmarking studies conducted by the Warehouse Education and Research Council (WERC) and DC Velocity.

Customers demand continuous improvement, and markets reward it. In 2007 the 25 companies with the best supply chains (as measured by AMR Research) greatly outperformed the S&P 500, producing an average total return of 17.9 percent, compared to 3.5% for the S&P.2 Companies with perfect order rates (a popular metric that measures customer orders that arrive complete, on time, undamaged, and with an accurate invoice) of 80 percent or higher are three times more profitable than companies with perfect order rates of 60 percent, a separate AMR Research study found.3 Better perfect order performance also correlates strongly to higher corporate earnings per share (EPS) and return on assets (ROA), the same study found. Figure 1 below highlights these findings.