The second annual 3 V’s of Supply Chain Innovation Awards Contest is in full flight at CSCMP’s EDGE Conference, recognizing companies that have used the 3 V’s Framework (variability, visibility, and velocity) to achieve success.
I’m repeatedly asked, which companies use their supply chain networks as their anchor of corporate competitiveness, embracing variability, harnessing visibility, and competing with velocity?
The top supply chain networks I admire demonstrate a clear “competitive moat” with their supply chain networks and have a market-based strategic advantage. While I somewhat appreciate the historical answers to the question, “Who are your top supply chains?”¾the answers to this question tend to be based on the tactical views of balanced scorecards, return on equity or assets, and how supply chains impact business performance. However, my top supply chains are above that fray.
I am a true believer that strategy is very different from tactics. So, I put a different lens on the question. My top supply chains are my industry “icons”: Intelligently Curated Orchestration Networks. Companies that see their supply chain networks as strategic assets embrace variability, harness visibility, and compete with velocity by deliberately curating their supply chain network.
The supply chains I admire use their supply chains not just as logistical tools but as strategic weapons, transforming them into powerful engines of market-based advantage to rise above the competition. These companies Intelligently Curate and Orchestrate their Network.
What supply chains truly stand out?
Which companies have redefined the role of supply chains, turning complexity into opportunity and positioning themselves as leaders in the face of uncertainty? Three companies that are using their supply chain networks as an anchor of corporate competitiveness are Banner Engineering, Tracegains, and Altana.
Banner Engineering
At the heart of Banner's success is its ability to embrace variability by harnessing the visibility of their customer's wants and needs and a deep understanding of their suppliers' capacities and capabilities. This insight allows them to embrace variability by serving multiple industries with thousands of different products at an unmatched velocity. Banner doesn't merely adapt to change; it thrives on it. Each year, they introduce over 30 new products, consistently creating solutions that customers love.
Minneapolis-based Banner Engineering, founded in 1966, has emerged as a leading designer and manufacturer of industrial automation products. With a portfolio of more than 10,000 products, Banner serves multiple industries, including automotive, food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, packaging, electronics, materials handling, and logistics. Their extensive range includes award-winning sensors, wireless systems, machine safety equipment, indication devices, and LED lighting.
Banner's supply chain is not viewed as a cost center but as a strategic advantage. By leveraging a network of 5,000 engineers and support personnel, Banner has built a 360-degree view of its ecosystem. This finely tuned machine allows them to recombine ideas, technologies, and processes while continuously delivering value. It's this interconnectedness—between customer needs and supplier capabilities—that enables Banner to stay ahead of the competition, not just today but in the uncertain future that lies ahead.
The company's engineering prowess is a key factor in its success. Banner designs and engineers products that create a preferred customer lifecycle experience. Their ability to combine and recombine with speed, quality, consistency, and support is unparalleled. Design engineering and orchestrating the supply chain have become Banner's competitive advantage.
Banner's approach to innovation is about velocity—the ability to accelerate innovation, design new solutions, and respond to customer needs at a speed unmatched by their competitors. This is the secret of supply chain mastery. It's not just about being fast or efficient; it's about seeing the interconnections and using that visibility to continuously create new products and services with velocity.
Banner's global impact is significant, with operations on five continents and a worldwide team of over 5,500 employees and partners. In fact, a Banner product is installed somewhere in the world every two seconds. The company's commitment to personalized service and attentive support, offering both face-to-face and virtual interaction with customers, has helped them solve tough applications and advance manufacturing processes globally.
Banner Engineering's success stems from its ability to embrace variability, harness visibility, and compete on velocity. By leveraging their engineering knowledge and relationships with customers and suppliers, Banner continues to innovate and provide cutting-edge automation solutions for manufacturers worldwide.
TraceGains
TraceGains' success can be directly tied to empowering manufacturers to embrace variability through their massive catalog, which allows them to rapidly increase the velocity of product introduction and their ability to harness visibility and embrace variability, enabling a high-velocity "ingredients to product" supply chain. The company has positioned itself as a de facto standardizer of processes and methods for sourcing, building trust that allows its ecosystem to rapidly source, assemble, and reassemble ingredients-based products with unmatched velocity, quality, and process assurances.
Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Westminster, Colorado, TraceGains has emerged as a pioneering force in the food and beverage industry. The company's innovative platform provides a 360-degree view of a hyperspecialized ecosystem, connecting ingredients manufacturers with consumer product manufacturers across a vast network of 75,000+ supplier locations and 525,000+ ingredients/items.
TraceGains' supply chain network serves as both a graph and an intersection point, mapping suppliers against product requirements, quality credentials, and manufacturer pedigree requirements. This comprehensive view forms the foundation of the company's competitive moat, providing unparalleled insights and capabilities to its clients.
The power of TraceGains' platform is exemplified by its approach to ingredient taxonomy. For instance, an ingredient as seemingly simple as garlic is meticulously categorized within their network, from raw and organic to processed, chopped, and packaged in specific container sizes. This granular level of detail enables precise matching and sourcing capabilities.
TraceGains' intelligent network continuously monitors global events through “horizon scanning,” tracking adverse events, import refusals, and recalls. This real-time intelligence allows customers to remain informed about issues relevant to their specific ingredient needs, avoiding unnecessary concerns about unrelated incidents.
A key strength of TraceGains lies in its commitment to standardization and curation. Working closely with large customer advisory groups, the company has developed standardized data formats for numerous forms and data types, including allergens, nutrition, sustainability, and supplier and item risk assessments. This standardization significantly reduces friction in the supply chain, as suppliers can enter data once in a standardized format, which then automatically propagates to all their customers on the network.
TraceGains rapidly accelerates the velocity its customers can source, assemble, and reassemble its products. By leveraging artificial intelligence and standardizing data across its network, TraceGains enables manufacturers to source, assemble, and reassemble products with unprecedented speed and precision. The company's approach transforms potential chaos into order, using the power of its supply chain network to anticipate disruptions and act proactively.
Their supply chain’s main strength? Turning chaos into order. TraceGains has turned variability into its greatest strength, enabling a supply chain that is as agile as it is reliable and capable of meeting the unique demands of each customer while sourcing from the most appropriate suppliers with the highest fidelity at velocity.
Altana
Altana enables its customers through its supply chain network to embrace variability by providing a digital, dynamic, universal global supply chain map. By harnessing visibility through its federation, Altana allows for the standardization of multi-party workflows, enabling companies to combine, recombine, monitor, and surveil their supply chain at high velocity.
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in New York City, Altana has emerged as a force in supply chain network management by operating on an even larger scale, connecting governments, logistics providers, and businesses around the globe through a federated system of supply chain intelligence, offering unprecedented visibility and insights into global value chains.
Central to Altana's innovation is its proprietary "federated learning" architecture. Unlike traditional centralized data models, Altana has pioneered a decentralized, "hub-and-spoke" approach. This revolutionary design allows customers to share intelligence without ever exposing their underlying data, thereby maintaining data sovereignty, privacy, and security for all participants in the network.
The Altana “knowledge graph” is a testament to the power of this approach. It now comprises more than 2.8 billion shipments, tracking over 500 million companies and 850 million facilities down to the part-site level, with more than 125 million distinct facility-to-facility relationships. This vast network creates a common operating picture of the world's interconnected supply chains, spanning across governments, logistics providers, financial services companies, and other associated service providers.
Altana's Value Chain Management System enables real-time visibility into supply chains that cross borders and industries. For instance, a top global retailer uses Altana to understand potential upstream exposure to forced labor in its value chains, ensuring compliance with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. Simultaneously, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) uses the same system to enforce this law, while logistics giants like Maersk utilize it to model global value chains for the shipments they handle.
This interconnected ecosystem allows for unprecedented coordination and streamlining of compliance and enforcement activities. Parties that would otherwise be unable to share data due to fragmentation, silos, and interoperability issues can now view the same network relationships, remediate compliance exposures, and act collaboratively to facilitate trusted trade and avoid disruptions at borders.
The impact of Altana's innovation extends far beyond individual companies. By creating a shared source of truth for global supply chains, Altana is helping to recalibrate and rebuild secure and trusted supply chains on a global scale. This approach aligns with key principles of supply chain network competitiveness: embrace variability, harness visibility, and compete with velocity.
My Industry ICONS
My industry ICONS have turned their supply chain networks into competitive weapons. They’ve learned that variability is not a hindrance but a source of strategic advantage. Through their supply chain networks, they enable their customers to embrace variability, harness visibility, and compete on velocity, which is what sets them apart. Like a finely organized complex adaptive system, they have curated and cultivated their hyperspecialized networks to achieve something competitively differentiated.
Banner Engineering, TraceGains, and Altana use their supply chain networks and 360-degree view to a strategic advantage. Their relationships and knowledge of their federations' capability and capacity define their strategic positions, and their ability to harness surveillance and enable rapid recombinant behavior creates their moats.
The companies that will dominate the future understand that success is not just about making the right tactical decisions on a day-to-day basis; it’s about building the infrastructure that allows you to evolve and adapt to tomorrow’s challenges. Banner Engineering, TraceGains, and Altana are not just companies—they are supply chain ICONs. Shining examples of what can be achieved when you embrace variability, harness visibility, and compete on velocity.
They are, in every sense, flying above the fray.
