Gartner has named Seagate to its Supply Chain Top 25 for 2015, alongside business leaders like Amazon, Coca-Cola, Intel, Nestlé, Toyota and Johnson & Johnson. The ranking is designed to recognize global supply-chain leaders, and to highlight their best practices so heads of supply chain and strategy organizations can learn from them.
What’s the Supply Chain and why does it matter to customers?
As many of our system-builder partners are well aware, Supply Chain Management encompasses the full set of processes manufacturers go through to understand and meet customer needs — the planning and management of all material sourcing and procurement, conversion, and logistics management activities. “Importantly, it also includes coordination and collaboration with channel partners, which can be suppliers, intermediaries, third-party service providers, and customers,” says the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals. “In essence, supply chain management integrates supply and demand management within and across companies. It includes all logistics and manufacturing operations, and it drives coordination across marketing, sales, product design, finance and information technology.”
Strong supply-chain practices lead to higher-quality service, responsiveness, efficient demand fulfillment, more resiliency with less variability, and highly consistent just-in-time delivery — all critical to our customers’ ability to meet their own customers’ needs.
Gartner’s ranking process
How does Gartner choose which companies to honor? The rankings comprise two main components: financial and opinion. “Public financial data gives a view into how companies have performed in the past, while the opinion component provides an eye to potential and reflects future expected leadership, a crucial characteristic,” Gartner’s announcement said.
Assessments by a distinguished panel of industry and supply chain analysts, and by a peer panel of supply chain professionals, are included in the scoring process that determines the Top 25.
This is the second consecutive year Seagate ranked in the Gartner Supply Chain Top 25, advancing from twentieth in 2014 to sixteenth in 2015, thanks to a continuous effort to re-engineer business practices and strengthen supplier relationships.
It’s about understanding and solving customer needs
“Our supply chain has become a valuable tool giving customers added confidence in Seagate’s ability to provide a sustainable supply of drives to their businesses,” said Bob Legendre, Seagate’s senior VP of supply chain management. “Seagate is wholly focused on continuously improving the effectiveness of our entire supply chain so we can meet the needs of our customers while adapting to changes in global logistics and the macro economy.”
Legendre says Seagate’s supply chain improvement efforts have focused on metrics to streamline and inform business operations which included developing a supplier risk database benchmarked by customers and industry leaders to gauge supplier health. An enhanced sales, inventory, operations and planning process was also implemented to assure better visibility into customer demands.
Being ranked with other leaders on such a prestigious list is a nice validation of our work to develop a world class supply chain!
–
Who is John Paulsen? A creator, family man and former small-business leader myself, I feel your pain (and joy) and hope you’ll enjoy the blog. I launched and ran a well-regarded production company in San Francisco with a team of 9 brilliant, hard working people. I learned to manage a wide array of tasks a small business must handle — business strategy, facilities design, HR, payroll, taxes, marketing, all the way down to choosing telecom equipment and spec’ing a server system to help my team collaborate in real-time on dense media projects from multiple production rooms. I’ve partnered with and learned from dozens of small business owners.
