Supply chain top 25 firms are chosen from a master list of companies derived primarily from Fortune’s Global 500 ranking. For consistency, certain industries like financial services and insurance are excluded so the master list contains firms in the manufacturing and retail sectors (www.gartner.com/supplychaintop25). The supply chain top 25 ranking process includes two components: financial and opinion. The financial element measures SCM performance while the opinion element measures SCM competency. To negate any risk of tautology (i.e.’ financial independent variables predicting financial outcome variables) the financial elements of Gartner’s supply chain top 25 ranking process are not utilized in our study and the SCM top performers identified in the current research are selected based purely on the opinion data element. Moreover, consistent with the approach utilized in Ellinger et al.(2011), a series of tests performed to assess correlations between the financial and opinion elements of the Gartner supply chain top 25 Rankings for the years under examination indicated that these two components are not significantly correlated.