The award, jointly sponsored by SupplyChainBrain magazine and web site and CSCMP's Research Strategies Committee, is designed to recognize corporate teams’ groundbreaking supply chain innovations that result in quantifiable and sustainable cost-saving, revenue-generating, or customer-satisfaction achievements.

The Flextronics submission, entitled  End-to-End Supply Chain Innovation and Technology Transformation, described the contract manufacturer's efforts to bring its design, material acquisition and prototype manufacturing units into one Center of Excellence at its Milpitas, Calif., location. In the view of the Flextronics team, today's rapid pace of development and shortened time-to-market expectations require a completely advanced level of synchronization across the end-to-end supply chain.

Sears Holding Corp. was the runner-up in this year's case study competition. Its entry, Fulfilling the Promise of Integrated Retail: A Store Based Network for Online Order Fulfillment, detailed efforts to improve the speed of online fulfillment without significant capital investment. The company used a portion of its vast store network for online fulfillment, with locations strategically chosen based on geographical coverage and alignment with the UPS network. Each location was able to fulfill hundreds of orders a day from inventory already in stores.

Other finalists in this year's competition included Intel, Fast Logistics and John Snow Inc./USAID and the Zimbabwe National Family Planning Council.