The six winners across the three categories are as follows:

Healthcare Supply Chainnovators:

Advocate Health Care — Advocate Health Care won the 2018 Healthcare Supply Chainnvator award for its supply chain and clinical collaboration with Abbott to address patient malnutrition. The cost consequences of hospital malnutrition has been a major concern for decades, with nutrition intervention being overlooked as a strategy to reduce readmissions and length of stay. Advocate and Abbott partnered to determine if screening patients and providing them supplements during hospitalization would reduce readmissions. Informatics were implemented into electronic medical records to accelerate the automatic dispensing of oral nutrition supplements. An algorithm determined what type of ONS to administer based on the patient's diet and malnutrition screening. The partnership achieved significant results — 30-day readmission rates were reduced by 29 percent; length of hospital stays were reduced by 26 percent; and cost analysis illustrated savings of more than $3,800 per patient treated over six months.

Johnson & Johnson — Johnson & Johnson (J&J) won the 2018 Healthcare Manufacturers, Distributors, and Retailers Supply Chainnovator award for its 3-D Printing Center of Excellence (COE). The COE, launched in 2015, is staffed by about 25 full-time people, mostly technical in the beginning. It expanded over time to include business development roles that connect with commercial and R&D organizations in each business unit. To date, the COE has launched 12 products and processes across the implants and instruments categories, with another 18 in the development phase. These products have been in the area of medical devices (such as orthopedic implants and reconstruction cages) and consumer health (optimizing the Listerine bottle supply chain). The COE has provided the benefits of faster product development, the ability to develop personalized and on-demand health solutions, manufacturing efficiency, innovative designs, and overall lower supply chain costs from a reduced amount of inventory carried.

High-Tech Manufacturing Supply Chainnovators:

Flex — Flex, an end-to-end supply chain solutions company that provides design, engineering manufacturing, logistics and aftermarket service capabilities for more than 1,000 supply chains across 18 different industries, was recognized for its Intelligent Supply Chain Platform that enables near-real-time visibility and speeds up its ability to respond to supply chain events across its massive and complex network. The Intelligent Supply Chain Platform has transformed Flex's culture and the way employees operate by replacing fragmented data feeds — which slowed down the decision-making process — with synchronized near-real-time data. The increase in speed also reduced cost, accelerated working capital, reduced lead time and improved customer satisfaction. To date, Flex's Intelligent Supply Chain platform has generated hundreds of millions in free cash flow, paying for itself within 90 days of launch.

Intel — Traditionally an expert at in-house manufacturing, Intel now leverages a hybrid manufacturing model that integrates both internal and external manufacturing resources. To realize its goal of effectively managing this hybrid manufacturing supply chain, Intel pioneered a novel approach for blending demand, supply and procurement by creating one configurable, integrated system for planning and optimizing its diverse portfolio of products and production sites. Intel estimates the value of its novel planning system in numerous ways — from the benefits of process simplification to its ability to speed and improve decision making. For the products planned and procured using this tool, Intel reports $100m in positive impacts to gross margin, cost avoidance and resource optimization. Through the team's focus on developing a tool with the flexibility to address the requirements of each unique business, the team deployed a system with the ability to replace the unique planning and procurement processes that had been previously performed by multiple tools, including email and spreadsheets.

Consumer/Retail Supply Chainnovators:

Consumer Product: Brightstar — Brightstar won for its circular economy supply chain initiative that allows the company to turn old mobile devices into a profitable new revenue stream. To achieve this, Brightstar leverages a network of telecom retailers to repurchase used devices. These are then rapidly assessed and processed using a combination of robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence before the devices are resold or rented in secondary markets. The Brightstar circular economy initiative has achieved significant results, helping to grow its reverse logistics into a multibillion-dollar business unit.

Retail: Lesara — Lesara, an online fashion retailer that sells across 24 European countries, was named the Retail Supply Chainnovator for 2018 for establishing an agile supply chain operation that creates products — from idea to consumer purchase — within 10 business days. Rather than conducting long-term market research, Lesara takes a data-driven approach to allow for near-real-time decision making and merchandise design. To support this rapid decision-making, an internally developed analytical tool that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning analyses image and text data scraped from across the internet with a focus on social media. Merchandisers leverage this analysis to ensure new product designs are aligned with real-time fashion industry trends. These are then passed to a network of established manufacturing partners within China that bid, via reverse auction, to immediately start production. Lesara's rapid time-to-market allows the company to utilize a demand-driven pull replenishment model rather than the push approach utilized in many traditional fashion retailers. This allows Lesara to achieve a full-price sell-through rate of approximately 90 percent while turning inventory 11 times per year.  

Through the Supply Chainnovator research and recognition program, Gartner recognizes supply chain innovation and impact delivered by supply chain organizations. Companies recognized as Chainnovators have been successful with unconventional, innovative and/or high-impact approaches that peer leaders can learn from and emulate. The program provides chief supply chain officers with valuable insight for annual strategic planning, resource allocation and investment cycles.

These innovations must meet the threshold of being impactful, sustainable, unconventional, collaborative and measurable. Participants must be willing to share with the broader supply chain community lessons learned and how results were achieved. The goal is to recognize innovative approaches to supply chain excellence that result in a step change in business performance. The winners were selected by a panel of judges that consisted of Gartner analysts.

Source: Gartner