Readers' Choice Survey 2017

Top Tech Providers for a Hyper-Competitive Marketplace

In these modern times, you can’t run a successful, competitive consumer goods business without forging a solid foundation in technology. And you can’t build that foundation without enlisting help from reliable technology and service partners. But which firms do consumer goods professionals favor?

From ERP to Retail Execution and every function in between, CGT’s 17th annual Readers’ Choice Survey shines a spotlight on the industry’s preferred solution and service providers. The resulting Top Providers lists in 15 mission-critical categories can serve as a valuable investment guide for your company’s future business and IT decisions.

In addition, we’ve enlisted help from a powerhouse panel of industry experts to pinpoint how technology is being leveraged to transform five critical business areas. (Like we said, no one can do it alone these days.)

Click on the business area below to view the relevant Readers' Choice lists and read the articles.

• Customer Management (Customer Relationship Management, Trade Promotion Management, Retail Execution, Mobility)

• Digital Marketing (Consumer Experience Management, Digital Commerce, Product Information Management)

• Supply Chain (Supply Chain Planning, Supply Chain Execution, New Product Development & Introduction)

• IT Infrastructure (Enterprise Resource Planning, Business Intelligence, Demand Data Analytics)

• External Resources (Consulting, Outsourcing)

Also, click here to see this year's Editors' Picks, a supplemental list of 14 handpicked technology companies that consumer goods organizations should consider when looking to solve their unique IT and business needs.

Survey Methodology
The Top Providers list for each category showcases the 10 companies (or fewer, in some cases) that received the best overall scores for the solutions and/or services they deliver to consumer goods organizations. Presented in alphabetical order, with the provider selected as “Best in Category” identified at the top, these lists were determined by responses from hundreds of executives and employees who work with these tools daily.

To ensure the integrity of the survey, only consumer goods executives — the clients of these providers — are eligible to vote, and only once. (CGT has internal checks in place to detect fraudulent voting activity.) We also ask respondents to vote only in the categories that match their own areas of expertise, whether that’s in supply chain, product development, sales and marketing or general IT.

In each relevant category, respondents were asked to identify the provider whose tools or services they currently use. They were then asked to rank their level of satisfaction with that provider on a scale of 1 to 5 (with 1 being “extremely dissatisfied” and 5 being “extremely satisfied”). A company’s total score was then computed by multiplying the number of votes it received in the category by its average user satisfaction rating in that same category.

In addition to the list of Top Providers in each category, CGT highlights three companies that received special honors based on the results:

• Best in Category: This recognition identifies the provider that received the highest total score in its category.

• Customer Experience Leader: This recognition identifies the provider that earned the highest average user satisfaction rating in the category, regardless of the number of votes received.

• SMB Market Leader: This recognition identifies the provider that received the highest total score in the category from respondents whose companies generate annual revenues of $1 billion or less.

As usual, CGT also presents its “Editors’ Picks” to showcase an additional group of intriguing technology and service providers that aren’t represented in the list, but which nonetheless are doing noteworthy work for the industry. (See link, above.)