The capability assessment element, normally conducted over two days, identifies the strengths and opportunities against best practice across the organisation from strategy and organisation, through product introduction and manufacturing as well as supply chain planning and management. It also incorporates themes such as social responsibility and environmental improvement.  The assessment separates the Foundation activities required to establish business stability from Progressive activities that drive competitive advantage. Crucially, while designed to meet the needs of companies at all levels in the supply chain and to be sector neutral, the assessors are able to identify the improvement opportunities that should be the focus in the context of the specific business, not just to increase the assessment points score.

The Competitiveness assessment phase identifies the current and future target performance of the organisation against six dimensions – Quality, Delivery, Cost, Flexibility, Technology & Product, Customer Experience. With a similar self-assessment review process conducted by the organisation and assessor led (anonymised feedback) reviews with customers the key improvement drivers are identified. This ensures that activities are directly focussed to evidenced competitiveness improvement requirements, avoiding focus on areas that will not drive impact.

The assessment provides a repeatable approach to link the competitiveness self-assessment, customer assessments and the capability assessment to develop a Workstream activity plan ensuring all training and support identified has direct business impact potential. A simple financial assessment model is also developed to enable the financial impacts of implementing activity to be measured and the return on investment (financial and time) to be validated.

Our experienced assessor team uses this unique assessment programme to guide senior leaders to rapidly develop transformation and improvement roadmaps with clear links between activities and business competitiveness.

In addition to using the assessment to review single organisations, the Industry Forum Competitiveness Assessment has also been successfully used to underpin national level programmes, both in the UK and abroad to develop sector supply chains. Assessment of success is identified based on the combination of improvement to capability, improved customer competitiveness perception and financial impacts delivered.