Gartner announces rankings of the 2016 Supply Chain Top 25

Gartner, Inc. has released the findings from its annual Supply Chain Top 25, identifying the best supply chain leaders and highlighting their strengths. Analysts announced the findings at the Gartner Supply Chain Executive Conference.

Stan Aronow, Research Vice President of Gartner, said: "2016 marks the 12th year of our annual Supply Chain Top 25 ranking. In this year's edition, there are several long-time leaders with new lessons to share and a number of more recent entrants from the high-tech, industrial, chemical, auto and life sciences sectors."

For the first time, Unilever topped the ranking, followed by McDonald's, Amazon, Intel and a newcomer to the top five, H&M. Five new companies made the Supply Chain Top 25 this year with Schneider Electric, BASF and BMW joining the list for the first time, and HP and GlaxoSmithKline re-joining after several years.

Apple and P&G continued to qualify for the Masters category, which Gartner introduced in 2015 to recognize sustained supply chain leadership over the last 10 years. While this category is separate from the overall Supply Chain Top 25 list, these companies continue to be evaluated as part of Gartner's annual research study.

Apple continues to succeed by offering platforms that ecosystems of partners build on to meet customers' needs. The big continuous question for Apple and its supply chain is whether it can deliver on the next big innovations to continue the revenue and earnings pace of the last decade.

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