Gartner announces 2020 Supply Chainnovator Award winners

Gartner, Inc. has announced the winners of the 2020 Supply Chainnovator Awards. The awards recognize unconventional, innovative and high-impact supply chain initiatives that transform the supply chain in the life sciences, healthcare providers, high-tech, consumer products, industrial and retail sectors.

According to Eric O’Daffer, VP Analyst, “range is the key word” for innovations this year.  In an interview, he says Supply Chainnovator winners showed that innovation comes in a lot of areas. These innovations represented the best of our six primary industry groups from over 100 entries. 

“Diverse innovations from a physical Central Laundry plants impacts to cost, service and the community at Cleveland Clinic to innovations focused on the digital supply chain at Intel and SKF showed this range clearly. Layer in packaging, regulatory and logistics innovations at Phillip Morris, Amgen and Woolworths and it is inspiring to see the value demonstrated in the key areas of innovation, impact, sustainability and collaboration. 

He adds that In light of COVID-19,  supply chain has never been more important to companies and consumers.

“We expect another banner year of supply chain innovation in 2021 as companies share how they dealt with disruption on a new level,” concludes O’Daffer.

The six winners across the categories are as follows:

Life Sciences Chainnovator: Amgen
Amgen won the 2020 Life Sciences Chainnovator Award for the use of serialization and traceability technology to improve the accuracy of its reimbursement calculations for returned U.S. products and to capture significant value. The enhanced return data allowed their systems to match the returned product to the original delivery. From this match, the pack-specific reimbursement price was calculated based on the price the item originally sold at. This process eliminated ongoing revenue leakage due to imprecise reimbursement pricing by an estimated $12 million per year. 

Finalists in this category: Ipsen, Johnson & Johnson

Healthcare Chainnovator: Cleveland Clinic
Cleveland Clinic was awarded the 2020 Healthcare Chainnovator Award for its laundry plant cooperative with Evergreen Cooperatives, a network of companies that creates jobs and builds community wealth as a nonprofit, employee-owned cooperative. The two organizations teamed up to design a unique operating model for Cleveland Clinic’s Collinwood laundry plant. Cleveland Clinic owns the plant, while Evergreen Cooperative Laundry (ECL) operates and staffs the plant. Cleveland Clinic’s collaboration with ECL enabled the cooperative to expand and employ over 150 full-time employees. The initiative enabled Cleveland Clinic to achieve a 20% reduction in laundry rates due to the efficiency of equipment installed and to improve its fill rate from 30% to 100%.

Finalists in this category: Rush University Medical Center, The University of Texas System

High-Tech Chainnovator: Intel
Intel won the 2020 High-Tech Chainnovator Award for its supply chain contract analytics technology. The solution can evaluate contractual risks for more than 100,000 Intel contract documents using 17 proprietary algorithms as well as optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP) to extract critical information from unstructured data. For the user, an interactive dashboard visualizes legal risks for more than 15 critical contract provisions in seconds. Intel expects savings of $19 million per year for indirect materials alone.

Finalists in this category: Microsoft, Western Digital

Consumer Products Chainnovator: Philip Morris International
Philip Morris International (PMI) was recognized for developing in-line digital hybrid printing capabilities for their folding cartons. In 2016, PMI partnered with Gallus-Heidelberg to develop an all-in-one digital press with the goal to deliver all printing, embellishing and finishing elements in one pass. This capability enabled the company to better respond to adult smoker preferences and adapt to the rapidly growing smoke-free products market, reducing the average route to market from four months to seven days. With all other commercial variables remaining unchanged, having PMI’s products in new markets or launching new products around 100 days earlier could translate into a potential net revenue risk mitigation of up to $400 million.

Finalists in this category: Hershey, Johnson & Johnson

Industrial Chainnovator: SKF
SKF was awarded the 2020 Industrial Chainnovator Award for its creation of a digital twin for analytics. With the data provided by the digital twin, SKF can automatically calculate each item’s external demand forecast and factor in lead times as well as actual stock levels throughout the supply network. The technology also provides safety stock levels and net forecasts for every warehouse and creates replenishment plans to satisfy future customer demand to set service levels. With the help of the digital twin, SKF has reduced inventory by 12%, a savings valued at $8.7 million, while maintaining service levels. It achieved these savings with 11% fewer planning resources. Extra planning capacity resources, liberated by automating redundant, repetitive, manual number crunching, are redeployed into higher-value activities like proactive demand management and customer interaction.

Finalists in this category: Siemens, Shell Lubricants

Retail Chainnovator: Woolworths Group
Woolworths Group won the 2020 Retail Chainnovator Award for its 2/3 Pallet Initiative – a project with the goal of changing the primary unit load device (ULD) in its Australian supermarket network to improve both supply chain efficiency and the in-store shopping experience. The initiative removed what had been a key supply chain bottleneck: the breakdown of a pallet delivered to store into a separate ULD before products were then taken to the shop floor for replenishment. The 2/3 pallet was identified as the most optimal for that purpose. Productivity improvements across the store network have been realized while customers now say aisles and stores using the 2/3 pallet are less congested and easier to navigate.

Finalists in this category: Ralph Lauren, Tory Burch