Peer panel voting is conducted in mid-April via a webbased, structured voting process. Panelists are taken through a
four-stage process to arrive at a final selection of firms that, in each of their opinions, come closest to Gartner’s DDSNI as
defined in Gartner Supply Chain Group Research reports and included in the instructions on the voting web site (O’Marah
and Hofman, 2010). The first stage provides instructions and a comprehensive description of the DDSNI. The second stage
requests demographic information. The third stage provides panelists with a complete list of the firms to be considered and
asks voters to choose 30-50 firms that, in each of their opinions, most closely meet the ideal. After each participant
chooses this subset of leaders, the fourth stage requires panelists to force-rank the firms from 1 through 25 with 1 being the company most closely meeting the DDSNI. Individual votes are collated across the entire panel with 25
points for a No. 1 ranking, 24 points for a No. 2 ranking and so on. The Gartner expert and peer panels use exactly the same polling procedure and the two sets of opinion data are weighted equally in the ranking process (O’Marah and
Hofman, 2010).