Topic guide / Benchmarking
Shopping Cart Reverse Engineering
Benchmarking usually means expensive consultants and binders of outdated statistics. In one of Tom’s favorite stories, the most useful data was sitting on a supermarket shelf.
The problem: gold-plated materials
At a major paper company, packaging for tissue and towel products was costing far too much. The official benchmarking data was slow and expensive, and approving cheaper materials required so many corporate sign-offs that nobody at the plant wanted to take the risk.
The method
The team went to local supermarkets, filled shopping carts with competitors’ products, and took them apart back at the plant—reverse engineering the packaging. Competitors were using significantly cheaper materials with no visible drop in quality.
- Buy the competitor products your customers actually choose
- Dissect them and record every material and specification
- Build a side-by-side matrix: your materials versus each competitor’s
- Calculate the cost difference per item and project a year of savings
- Show the evidence to the people who run the process—and to suppliers
Why it worked
The plant manager gave the project “air cover,” so it didn’t wait for corporate permission. Shop-floor operators saw the dissected products and took it as a challenge to prove they were the best. Suppliers worked beside operators during trials. Along the way the team found absurdities, such as multicolor shipping cases with red barcodes that scanners couldn’t read. The initiative saved the company more than $20 million in its first year.
The lesson for purchasing and supply-chain teams: you don’t need a million-dollar study. You need curiosity, a willingness to look at what the competition is doing, and the courage to let front-line people challenge the status quo.
