Supply chain performance measurement: a literature review and pilot study among Italian manufacturing companies

Due to the increasing complexity of supply chains, researchers recognize the need for measuring and monitoring the performance of those systems, in particular in those contexts where supply chains are considered a key factor of corporate success. Measuring the performance of supply chains is a complex task, mainly due to the numerous actors included in a supply chain, thus this issue has been well debated in literature. On the basis of these premises, the purpose of this research is twofold: first, to provide a systematic review of the literature related to supply chain performance measurement, focusing on recent papers; second, to test the use of performance measurement metrics among Italian companies. To this extent, we developed a questionnaire on supply chain performance measurement, and carried out a pilot study involving approx. 30 Italian companies operating in different market fields of the manufacturing industry. As a result, we identified a set of 39 metrics related to different supply chain processes, and found that the level of adoption of performance measurement metrics is quite high among the companies surveyed. Moreover, we identified some metrics which are used only seldom by the sample of companies surveyed. Results of this study can be useful to set appropriate performance measurement systems for the manufacturing industry.