PP&A led the study as a structured expert-interview benchmark. Rather than rely on published reports, the team identified and screened former supply chain, manufacturing and finance leaders from each of the seven peer companies, selecting people who had owned the relevant metrics at a global or regional level. Fifteen executives took part in structured 60-minute interviews, several of them returning for follow-up conversations to confirm specific figures.

The interviews covered two layers. The first was the numbers themselves: 2024 global results for each KPI, or the closest available range. The second, and more important, was definition: what each company counts as productivity, which measures sit inside its equipment effectiveness calculation, how it treats write-offs, and where its logistics costs start and stop. The team cross-validated the inputs through follow-up emails, selective survey responses and sessions with the client's own functional experts, then harmonized the results into comparable terms, flagging every place where alignment required judgement.

The final report presented each metric with a tiered peer comparison, the underlying definitions, and the adjustments made, so that the client could see both the ranking and the reasoning behind it.

The client received a harmonized benchmark across all ten KPIs for the peer group, built on definitions it could trace and defend. The comparison showed the company as best in class in two metric categories and placed it in the upper tier on several others, while pinpointing the areas, particularly net productivity and forecast accuracy, where specific peers were delivering more.

Because the study documented how each peer defines and measures its metrics, the client could separate real performance gaps from definitional differences. That distinction shaped how the leadership team set the next round of productivity targets and gave its supply chain function a peer-referenced baseline to measure progress against, rather than an internal one.

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