What companies have the top supply chains in the retail sector?

Well as usual, the analysts at Kantar Retail once again have tried to answer that question here late 2015, picking up the work in the annual PoweRanking report that was started many years ago by Cannondale Associates, which Kantar later acquired.

The full report covers a number of company performance measures for both consumer goods manufacturers and retailers, including such areas as brand power, marketing programs, sales teams, overall business fundamentals, and more. Supply chain management is one of the categories included in the survey.

The rankings for this year, as always, were developed through the interesting methodology of asking retailers to rate manufacturers on each of these categories, and manufacturers to rank retailers on a similar set of attributes. Most major CPG companies and retailers participate, with some 400 respondents in total across both groups.

Both manufacturers and retailers are from the consumer packaged goods, food and beverage areas. That means manufacturers in such categories as apparel/soft goods, electronics, hard goods, etc. are not included. Similarly, the participating retailers are drawn exclusively from sectors such as mass merchandise, traditional grocery, warehouse clubs, and drug store chains that focus on consumer packaged goods sales, and does not for example include department stores or most specialty retail areas. For the last couple of years, however, Amazon.com has been included in the retail group.

The scores represent the percentage of respondents that place a given manufacturer or retailer as having one of the top three supply chains in the industry.

Last week, we took a look at the rankings for the top 10 consumer packaged goods supply chains, where General Mills held on to the top spot for the third straight year, once again scoring just ahead of Procter & Gamble. (See Annual Kantar Retail Ranking of the Top Retail Supply Chains for 2015.)

This week, we take a look at the top retail supply chains as selected by manufacturers.

No surprise here, as once again Walmart topped the list, as it has done every year in the more than 10 years SCDigest has followed the PoweRanking results, and probably long before that.

And once again, Walmart did so in dominating fashion, with a score of 89.1%, meaning that percentage of manufacturers cited it as having one of the top three retail supply chains. That is actually down 2-3 percentage points from some years in the past, when Walmart scored in the low 90 percentages.

It also means 11% of manufacturers do not place Walmart in the top three retail supply chains - we would like to learn why, actually. So if that was you, let us know at the Feedback button below.

Once again, Kroger - which has made a big run in recent years - stayed in the number 2 spot, with a score of 41.1%, though that was less than Walmart's total. Costco moved up one notch to number 3, followed by Target and Publix to round out the top 5.

The full top 10 retail list is publshed below, where as you can see the scores really start to drop off after Costco.

Source: Kantar Retail

There was actually very little movement within the top 10 this year, with just a few companies such as Costco, Meijer, and HEB moving up or down only one spot, much less movement than in the CPG rankings. Dollar General moved into the top 10 this year, supplanting Safeway.

(Supply Chain Trends and Issues Article - Continued Below)