Transport Logistics

6.2. The need for new indicators

There is a trend towards highly complex webs of supply chains. In such chains, joint management

by many actors and interaction with other flows in the network is necessary. The simultaneous

management by many actors in a complicated supply web necessitates development of new indicators

that reflect the share of and responsibility for the use of system-wide resources and assets that

individual actors carry, respectively.

Traditional performance indicators for global logistics systems have relied largely on simple

quantitative measurements. While such simple measurements have helped to conduct partial

comparative analyses, by helping managers, customers, suppliers etc. to evaluate how well their own

subsystems perform in specific dimensions, they are inadequate for comparing the efficiency of

different supply chains as a whole.

The present micro and macro indicators are both inadequate for assessing the performance of

supply chains. The micro indicators, however relevant for single companies, are difficult to aggregate

to the supply chain level. The macro indicators reflecting the efficiency of supply chains tend to be

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disjointed and focused on particular concerns in isolation, rather than on a comprehensive review of all

supply chain aspects, which are of interest to policy makers.

Therefore, there is a need to develop a multi-criteria assessment system at a meso level for

conducting a comparative evaluation of logistics services in different countries which will cover total

logistics costs, quality of logistics services, and impacts on socio-economic factors. However, recent

work by the OECD (OECD, 2002) highlighted major problems with data availability for such analysis.

Key data problems include access to data that are commercially sensitive; cost of collecting, storing

and releasing data; timely access to data collected by government statistical agencies; and resource

constraints facing such agencies and their adoption of a “user pays” approach to

collecting/managing/releasing industry specific data.  In regard to the latter, many statistical

collections have been dropped by such agencies as a result of lack of funding.