SUPPLY MEASUREMENT
BUSINESS METRICS
Definition - A business metric is any type of measurement used to gauge some quantifiable component of a company's performance, such as return on investment (ROI), employee and customer churn rates, revenues, EBITDA, and so on.
It can also be defined generally as a unit or units of measure to gauge a company's performance and provide the company's employees with a standard to improve.

The current interest in performance measurements has led to a variety of supporting adages or clichés in the industry, such as:
• “Anything measured improves.”
• “What you measure is what you get.”
• “Anything measured gets done.”
• “You can’t manage what you do not measure.”
These are not new business ideas, but there are a few new twists. Using measurements to support manufacturing operations has its roots back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries with ideas espoused by Frederick W. Taylor, the father of applying scientific methods to running business.
His ideas for time and motion studies of operations were successfully used to scientifically manage production lines and warehouse operations.
These ideas, however, led to exaggerated business processes that transitioned into “running a business by the stopwatch” with employers treating human employees as if they were highly reliable, predictable machines to be monitored and controlled.
Over time, the workplace’s view of performance measurement became more humane and these exaggerated types of monitor and control methods fell out of favor, replaced by a focus on measuring a business’ performance rather than that of the individual.
Throughout the last decade, companies have expended significant amounts of time and effort to re-engineer their supply chains through business process change and technology focused on implementing integrated Supply Chain Management (SCM) principles.