Last week in his First Thoughts column, SCDigest editor Dan Gilmore reviewed the top 10 consumer packaged goods and retail supply chains, as reported once again from the annual PoweRanking report from Kantar Consulting.

The full study 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.      

Both manufacturers and retailers are mostly 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, convenience and drug store chains that focus on consumer packaged goods sales, and does not for example include department stores or most specialty retail areas.

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

As always, the report lists which companies CPG manufacturers expect will be the "Power Retailers" over the next 15 years. This year's results are shown in the chart below:

Projected "Power Retailers" over Next 15 Years

Source: Kantar Consulting

Just to be clear, the results say that 82.5% of CPG companies placed Walmart as one of top three most likely to be a Power Retailer in next 15 years, as did 69.3% % of respondents for number 2 Amazon, etc.

SCDigest would suggest these are rather conservative picks, meaning the results mostly stick with the curent status quo - and there are sure to be major changes over a decade and a half.

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