Logistics Managers’ Index helping to track supply chain changes

The Logistics Managers’ Index (LMI) is a collaborative project by several economics schools to measure monthly change across eight metrics to help determine how the supply chain is holding up and track whether changes or inflation risks could occur.

Dale Rogers, Professor at ASU’s W. P. Carey School of Business, joined “Arizona Horizon” to discuss the LMI and what the latest results are forecasting.

As focus on the supply chain has grown since the COVID-19 pandemic, the LMI project is hoping to use the data from the ground floor to try and track changes in America’s massive system for product distribution. The LMI can also possibly help us to predict inflation spikes if it finds certain metrics are off over the course of a month.

While many economists use gross domestic product (GDP), which accounts for the value of all final goods and services produced in the country, Rogers feels it isn’t a totally perfect measure of the status of the economy.

“It’s a lagging indicator; it’s telling you what already happened,” Rogers said.

By tracking eight logistical components and interviewing a number of managers throughout the country, the LMI aims to try and showcase the movement and changes occurring in the supply chain that often will pop up in the economy months later.

“Before something goes into GDP, it goes on a truck, it goes on a boat, it goes in a warehouse; it’s part of somebody’s inventories,” Rogers said. “So we can see ahead of time what’s going to happen in a couple of months.”

So what is the latest edition of the LMI, covering the month of June 2025?

“Upstream in the supply-chain, we’re seeing a bunch of people holding inventory,” Rogers said. “And also, we’re seeing increased inventory costs.”

Those changes in warehouses are leading Rogers to a different conclusion than the one being presented by investors on the stock market.

“Truthfully, the stock market doesn’t think the tariffs are a big deal,” Rogers said. “We think they’re going to start biting [at the] end of August, end of September.”