Apple has topped the rankings in the annual Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 survey – for the seventh year in a row. Gartner said: “It’s hard to argue with operations that regularly generate more than $10 billion in cash flow each quarter for existing products, while predictably bringing the next set of innovations to market.”
In fact, the top four companies were unchanged from last year. McDonald’s took second place, Amazon was third, Unilever fourth. P&G rose from sixth to fifth.
Gartner said it had identified three key trends among the leaders: deeper contextual understanding of customers, leveraging digital business as part of broader customer solutions and supply chain leading balanced growth.
And it put forward three recommendations:
1. Partner with sales and marketing to observe customers and understand their supply chain requirements in the context of the environments where they buy and use your products and solutions.
2. Establish and expand supply chain’s influence in cross-organizational governance bodies steering product life cycle management (PLM), integrated business planning and corporate social responsibility (CSR).
3. Help guide your customers toward a subscription/replenishment model for your product and supply chain solutions to lock in demand and streamline value chains.
Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 2014
Company Up/Down
1 Apple
2 McDonald’s
3 Amazon
4 Unilever
5 P&G ▲
6 Samsung Electronics ▲
7 Cisco Systems
8 Intel ▼
9 Colgate-Palmolive ▲
10 The Coca Cola Co ▼
11 Inditex ▲
12 Nike ▲
13 H&M ▲
14 Walmart ▼
15 PepsiCo ▲
16 Lenovo Group ▲
17 Starbucks ▼
18 3M ▲
19 Qualcomm ▲
20 Seagate Technology ▲
21 Kimberly-Clark ▲
22 Johnson & Johnson 2 ▲
23 Caterpillar ▼
24 Cummins ▼
25 Nestlé ▼
Two companies moved up into the Top 25 – Seagate, and Kimberly-Clark.
The rankings are made up of five elements. A quarter of each company’s score is given over to peer opinion, another quarter goes to Gartner opinion. Three year weighted ROA accounts for another quarter of the scored while inventory turns (15 per cent) and 3-year weighted revenue growth (10 per cent) make up the remainder.
