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Friday, May 30, 2014

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Gartner releases its 2014 Supply Chain Top 25 rankings

Gartner recently released its Supply Chain Top 25 for 2014, according to a company statement, identifying global supply chain leaders and their best practices. Apple topped the list for the fourth consecutive year.

The top ten of the Supply Chain Top 25 are: Apple, McDonald's, Amazon.com, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Samsung Electronics, Cisco Systems, Intel, Colgate-Palmolive, and The Coca-Cola Company.

Trends that emerged this year, according to Gartner, include the push to understand contextual reasons behind customer behavior and using the combination of physical and digital supply chains to deliver solutions (as opposed than selling individual products). A third trend they found is that business groups are increasingly regarding supply chain leaders as integrated partners, thinking in terms of supply chain design to improve their service and bottom line.

In terms of methodology, Gartner started its list with the annual Fortune Global 500 and Forbes Global 2000 rankings, and eliminated companies without supply chains or with no appropriate quantifiable data, the press release said.

The IT research firms said the score for each company evaluated was made up of three components — publicly available financial data, including return on assets (ROA), inventory turns, and revenue growth (50 percent); the opinion of Gartner analysts (25 percent); and the opinion of a panel made up of supply chain professionals from the manufacturing and retail sectors (25 percent).