The 2016 Supply Chain Top 25: Lessons from Leaders

In May of this year, Gartner published its 12th annual Supply Chain Top 25, a ranking of the world’s leading supply chains. As always, a primary goal of the Top 25 is to foster the celebration and sharing of best practices as a way to raise the bar of performance for everyone. Another objective of the Supply Chain Top 25 is to shine a light on the importance of the function and profession—within our community certainly, but also for corporate executives outside of supply chain and the investment community at large.

The ranking is focused on identifying supply chain leadership, which includes operational and innovation excellence, but also other behaviors such as corporate social responsibility and a desire to improve the broader practice of supply chain management. While the list always changes from year to year, there are some common characteristics that separate the best from the rest. This article discusses the insights and trends we’ve seen this year from the leaders.

What is the definition of excellence? Gartner defines excellence as demonstrating leadership toward a demand-driven ideal. Our Demand Driven Value Network (DDVN) model has seven dimensions with interrelated areas of capability in supply, demand and product lifecycle management, all enabled by robust strategy and governance. The maturity model follows five stages of progressive maturity along each dimension and tracks corporate supply chains through a journey from reactively operating in silos to eventually orchestrating for value across both internal and partner networks.

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