Gartner announces rankings of the 2021 Supply Chain Top 25

Analyst company Gartner has released the results from its annual global Supply Chain Top 25, identifying supply chain leaders and highlighting their best practices.

“In our 17th edition of the Supply Chain Top 25 we saw organizations continuing to deal with the effects of COVID-19 on their businesses. Therefore resiliency and agility capabilities became essential to survival,” said Mike Griswold, VP and team manager with the Gartner Supply Chain practice. “Our ranking highlights companies that possess these strategies and other differentiating capabilities.”

Cisco Systems scored the top spot in the ranking for the second consecutive year, followed by Colgate-Palmolive, Johnson & Johnson, Schneider Electric and Nestlé. Four new companies joined this year’s list: Dell Technologies, Pfizer, General Mills, and Bristol-Meyers Squibb.

“Strong revenue growth, strength in environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives, and recognition of leadership in the community opinion polls drove Cisco to the top spot for the second consecutive year,” said Griswold. “Cisco’s agility helped them prioritize video conferencing and critical infrastructure capabilities for hospitals and vaccine research.”

To recognize sustained supply chain excellence, Gartner introduced the “Masters” category in 2015. To be considered Masters, companies must have attained top-five composite scores for at least seven out of the last 10 years. All of last year’s Masters - Amazon, Apple, P&G, McDonald’s, and Unilever - qualified for the category this year.

“During times of disruption, these companies continue to lead by example and provide advanced lessons for the supply chain community,” Griswold added. “The Supply Chain Top 25 offer a platform for insights, learning, debate and contributions to the rising influence of supply chain practices on the global economy.”

For 2021, the Top 25 and Masters embraced three key trends: being purpose driven; achieving customer-driven transformation; and accelerated digital capabilities.

A maturity differentiator among purpose-driven organizations is that those further along in the journey are not simply supporting a varied list of “green” initiatives and people-related programs. Instead, they integrated these into a larger strategy alongside commercial partners. Some are even leveraging product marketing budgets to fund this work and integrating it into brand messages, instead of treating environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) investments as a purely operational cost.

Along with intermittent supply disruptions and larger-than-normal demand swings, the pandemic has driven an accelerated level of business model transformation across industries which required supply chains to be highly adaptive. “Many changes were driven by an outsized uptick in products and services delivered direct to customers and patients, instead of through more traditional, centralized locations such as physical stores and medical facilities,” Griswold said.

A Gartner survey of board of directors, taken late in 2020, showed that nearly 70% of companies accelerated their digital roadmaps during the pandemic. Some leading supply chains have reached a point in their transformation journeys where they consider themselves “digital first” in the use of technology to enable more seamless customer experiences and more automated and insightful decisions in supply and product management, at scale.

However, digital transformation would not be possible without the right talent. Leading companies conduct formal skills assessment and strategic workforce planning. AI, machine learning and big data analysis are the most common capabilities, and most are simultaneously recruiting and developing these skills in their organizations. Several advanced supply chain organizations run digital literacy and dexterity programs to enable employees to better understand and exploit digital business opportunities.

“Leaders must position new digital technologies as a means for employees to stop spending time on manual, non-value-added activities, so they can focus on providing value for their customers,” Griswold concluded.

More information is available in the report “The Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 for 2021: Leaders and Their Stories.” A replay of the webinar “The Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 for 2021” is available here.