The 2017 Supply Chain Top 25: Lessons from Leaders

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the September-October 2017 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

September-October 2017

When it comes to the next generation of supply chain management, the future just may be now. That’s one of the conclusions reached by Greg Gorbach, an analyst at the research firm ARC Advisory Group, after surveying supply chain executives, including subscribers to Supply Chain Management Review, on the digitization of their supply chains. In “The Great Digitization of Industry,” Gorbach notes that while it may take years for the widespread adoption of new technologies such as machine learning, additive manufacturing, smart factories and advanced analytics to become commonplace, digitization across verticals is happening faster than many of us…

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In May of this year, Gartner published its 13th 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 manage¬ment. 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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