Methodology

How the score is made.

Eight minutes of reading. Written for the person who would not sign off on an instrument they did not understand.

What SCHI is

Supply Chain Health Intelligence is a diagnostic. A short questionnaire becomes a number from 0 to 100, called the Arristal Score, and a maturity band that explains what the number means for management.

The score is built from five drivers — the operational capabilities that decide whether a supply chain holds up under stress. Each driver is measured by four questions on a 0-to-5 maturity scale. The driver score is the average. The overall score is the average of the drivers.

The report goes further than a number. It connects the score to a € impact on the income statement and the balance sheet, and recommends the one or two moves that will change the picture in the next cycle. The work is meant to be actionable inside a quarter, not a five-year programme.

The seven-layer model

The model is a way of accounting for the gap between what is real, what is perceived, and what gets measured. Each layer feeds the one below it. Each layer is a place where a problem can live without being seen by the layer above.

1
Reality
What is actually happening in the supply chain on any given day.
2
Perception
What the people inside the company believe is happening.
3
Capability
The processes, systems, and routines that turn perception into action.
4
Outcome
The numbers that result — service, cost, working capital, cash.
5
Index
The Arristal Score and its five driver components.
6
Interpretation
What the score means in the context of the company's financials.
7
Action
The one or two changes that will move the score in the next cycle.

The Arristal Score lives at Index. Most of the value is in the travel from Outcome to Interpretation to Action.

The five drivers

Five drivers, equal weight in v1. Each is measured by four questions, each question scored 0 to 5. Driver scores are visible to the client. The composition is in the report, not in this page.

Planning

Planning & Coordination

The discipline of building one operating plan that finance, operations, and commercial all agree to use. Measures whether the plan changes when reality changes — and how fast.

Question themes: — Plan ownership and the cadence of revision
— Forecast accuracy by category
— Inventory parameters and how often they are reviewed
— Cross-functional sign-off
Financial outcome: Working capital and stock-turn

Service

Service Reliability

The gap between commercial promises and operational delivery. Service is measured at the point of customer impact, not at the warehouse gate.

Question themes: — On-time-in-full at the line and order level
— Order amendment behaviour
— Complaints, claims, and the reasons behind them
— Customer segmentation in commitments
Financial outcome: Revenue retention and gross margin

Flow

Flow & Responsiveness

End-to-end cycle time and the variability inside it. A short average cycle hides nothing if the tail is long.

Question themes: — Order-to-cash and procure-to-pay timing
— Lead-time variance by node
— Decision latency at exception points
— Bottlenecks under stress
Financial outcome: Cash conversion cycle

Cost

Cost Efficiency

Visibility of cost-to-serve by customer, channel, and SKU, and the management routines that act on it. Not a procurement score.

Question themes: — Cost-to-serve modelling depth
— Channel and customer profitability
— Cost transparency in trade-offs
— Procurement leverage versus operational leverage
Financial outcome: Gross margin and operating margin

Risk

Risk & Resilience

Identification of single points of failure, the existence of tested contingencies, and the speed at which the company recovers from a real event.

Question themes: — Supplier concentration and qualified alternates
— Inventory positioning for shock absorption
— Crisis playbooks and last rehearsal
— Insurance against revenue volatility
Financial outcome: Revenue volatility and capital reserve

Maturity bands

Five bands across the 0-to-100 range. The band is a management translation of the score: how it feels to run the supply chain on a given day at that level of capability.

Range	Band	What it feels like
0–39	Reactive	Days are spent solving problems that should not have happened. Most numbers are explanatory after the fact.
40–54	Functional	The basics hold in calm conditions. They break under stress, and they break in the same places each time.
55–69	Integrated	Finance, operations, and commercial agree on a single set of numbers most of the time. Trade-offs are visible.
70–84	Intelligent	Decisions are based on data with known confidence. Variance is investigated, not absorbed.
85–100	Adaptive	Risk is priced into plans. Recovery times are short and predictable. The supply chain is a quiet part of the company.

Confidence and triangulation

A single respondent gives you one view of the supply chain. Three respondents, drawn from different functions, give you three views and the gaps between them. The gaps are usually the most useful finding in the report.

The Diagnostic mode uses three respondents and the Premium mode uses five. The report shows where they agreed and where they did not, by driver, by question, and by pair of functions.

Triangulation also runs against the financials. A high driver score on Cost paired with a margin that has been falling for two years is interpreted differently from the same score paired with a margin that has held. The report names the case and shows the working.

No claim in the report is made without its derivation attached. If you do not agree with a number, you can argue with the line that produced it.

What it is not

Four things SCHI is sometimes mistaken for. Acknowledging these saves a meeting later.

Not a benchmarking tool
We do not tell you where you sit against an industry. Industry medians are a poor compass for a single company with its own history.
Not a KPI dashboard
There is no live data feed. The scan is a moment in time, taken in four minutes, and the report is what you reason from.
Not a maturity model dressed up in software
Maturity bands are a way to read the score. The work is the diagnosis underneath the band, not the label.
Not a consulting framework
There are no five-box diagrams. The report is twelve to twenty-eight pages of specific findings about a specific company.

The methodology is documented in full in the source architecture reference held by Arristal. Anything in this page that is unclear is a fair question for the contact form.