The 2018 Supply Chain Top 25: Follow the leaders

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the September-October 2018 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

September-October 2018

If it’s September, it must be time for Gartner’sTop 25 supply chains, the lead article in this issue of Supply Chain Management Review. As I was reading this year’s contribution from Gartner, I was struck by the number of the Top 25 that have launched NextGen Supply Chain initiatives, using Big Data, artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning and the like to digitize their supply chains. It made me wonder: Is the rest of the pack falling behind or are they ready to follow the leaders?

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In May of this year, Gartner published its 14th 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.

As with last year, we are publishing our methodology for selecting the Top 25 along with our most notable trends separately on scmr.com.

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