Hello, my name is Jim Tompkins and I'm the president of Tompkins Associates and Tompkins International.
Bruce Tompkins is back with us today for our fourth installment on the series on the supply chain benchmarking and best practices consortium. In this fourth installment, Bruce will be discussing the process of joining the consortium.
I think you'll recall in the first part of this series, we discuss the organization of the consortium. In the second part, we talked about the services and activities of the benchmarking and best practices consortium, and in the third portion we discuss the Leadership Forum event.
Bruce, let's discuss the process of joining the consortium. How do consortium memberships actually work?
Bruce:
We've learned over time that there's not one size fits all for companies that want to join the consortium and what they get out of it, so we've created a three-level process for companies to join and to get out of the consortium what they want to. The three levels are designed for what level of investment companies are willing to put into benchmarking, and then of course, the deliverables that the consortium provides for participating at that level.
The first level that I'll talk about is the premium consortium member. This is really a company that is very interested in taking a deep dive into supply chain practices, processes, and metrics of performance. For an investment of $15,000, a company can participate across all the different areas of the supply chain that are covered by the consortium, which really goes anywhere from planning to sourcing, all the way through manufacturing, transportation, distribution, and sales and customer service. So it covers a wide slot of supply chain.
It provides access to all the tools that we have for our database, for surveys, all the reports that we do; really gives access to everything we do, including no conference fee for attending our Leadership Forum event. So it really is a great way to get involved with the consortium and get a wide cross-section of your supply chain covered.
The other thing that's really important about the premium level is that it allows you access to information in the entire database, and you can put in information into the system for as many business units, divisions, branches, locations, how ever you want to segment it, as you wish. What this really does for companies is open up the possibility of doing internal benchmarking, as well as external benchmarking. If you enter in data from three divisions, let's say, you can compare the data, as well as comparing it to other companies.
The next level of membership is the consortium member. This level of membership is intended for an organization that really wants to focus on one or two topics in the supply chain. You select from the 12 total topics that we cover, you select which you want to participate in. For an investment of $2,500 per topic you get everything that we do, with respect to each one of those topics. You get access to the Core Benchmarks Scorecard, you get tools that are involved with querying the database and you also get to participate in special surveys that we do.
There's really a good value for those companies that are looking for a topic or two, or three, that they really want to focus on. The next level of membership is a contributing member. In this case, we created a section of the database called the Core Benchmarks. This is 88 key metrics of performance all across all aspects of the supply chain. We think these are really the critical 88 metrics that companies are measuring today in the supply chain. We provide access to the Core Benchmarks section for no charge.
In other words, we are willing to exchange your access to the system for the data that we collect when people participate at this level, and you still get to participate in our Hot Topic surveys. We have a scorecard process that is built off of the Core Benchmarks. That tool is available to you to do comparison of your metrics to other companies' metrics. One last point to comment on is that the consortium member and the contributing member are also invited to our Leadership Forum. That's really how the consortium membership works.
Jim:
Who can join the consortium?
Bruce:
Really, who can join has to do with being a supply chain company and being a supply chain that you can share information about. That's really the only requirement for being a member of the consortium, is that you are able to share some data from your supply chain. Most companie that participate are manufacturers, retailers, wholesalers, and distributors and those kinds of companies that make, move, and distribute product. We do have some companies that are unique in the way they operate. There's all different kinds of companies that participate, including hospitals, health care providers, and in some cases, some 3PLs that operate supply chains for a specific organization in their companies.
Jim:
Bruce, how do companies get involved with joining the supply chain benchmarking and best practices consortium?
Bruce:
Good question. We reach out to companies in a variety of different ways. Each year, we personally invite about 2500 companies to join us in the consortium, and we reach out to them via email and letter, and ask them if they would be interested in joining the consortium. We also get referalls from our member companies, saying that we would like company X, Y and Z to join, can you reach out to them and get them to participate with us. We rely heavily on our members to help us learn about other members who could be involved. We also have a LinkedIn and Xing group for the Supply Chain Consortium.
We use that process to get people to know who we are and request information from us, and we send them that information and might do a meeting to have them discuss. We also launched an online application process this past July, and that process has been very effective at getting members to see the benefits that they can get by participating with us, and with a very easy, 'answer a few questions' approach to join as contributing members to the consortium. This online application process has been very effective in taking us from about 300 companies and we now stand at 350 companies.
Our goal is to provide as much value to the members as possible. It is our intention to make it easy to get ahold of us, easy to join using the online process, and easy to stay engaged with all the LinkedIn and Xing tools, as well as access to our well-designed and implemented website. Once again, the website for the consortium is www.supplychainconsortium.com and if you go there you can learn everything you need to know to see if the consortium is right for you. Jim, I think that is about it, for this podcast, thanks a lot.
Jim:
Bruce, I certainly appreciate your being with us today and helping our listeners understand how to join the consortium. I look forward to the next installment - the last one in this series - on Lessons from the Leaders. We look forward to speaking with you all real soon.
