Walmart, Macy's, JCPenny, Marks & Spencer, Façonnable, American Apparel, and others are implementing item-level RFID in a big way. Last year, well over one billion apparel items were tagged. That number is expected to rise substantially this year.

Analyst Insight: Retail has reached a number of crucial tipping points. The economy, online shopping, technology, store relevance and other factors are driving companies to the crossroads where business strategy meets the supply chain. Traditional thinking around customer satisfaction, distribution networks and operations is obsolete given the huge impact of these tipping points on all supply chains. Going beyond the crossroads means having the right business strategy and having the right supply chains. - Jim Tompkins, CEO & President, Tompkins International

Analyst Insight: As traditional retailers feel the sting of Amazon's long tail whip, e-commerce and retail are merging into omni-channel strategies. In the Connected Age everyone is always connected to everything, always on, and location based. Just as the power shifted from manufacturer to retailer, the power in the retail channel has now shifted to the consumer who can buy anything from anyone, anytime, from anywhere. You better know your customer and your market to succeed. - Rich Sherman, Supply Chain Discipline Expert at Trissential

Analyst Insight: Retail is in a dramatic transformative phase. Consumers' multichannel access and shopping and web commerce vs. in-store shopping have retailers experimenting with many new approaches and technologies. Multi-merged channel expectations put fulfillment front and center as a major concern - no more relegating supply chain to the backwaters of retail management! - Ann Grackin, CEO, ChainLink Research

Analyst Insight: Multichannel fulfillment can be defined as optimizing the supply chain's capabilities to simultaneously receive and process orders from multiple ordering channels and fulfill them from the source that provides the highest level of consumer satisfaction and lowest fulfillment cost to the retailer. This model for fulfillment is both customer - and cost-driven and, therefore, the new de facto standard for the retail supply chain. - Joe Vernon, Manager of North America Supply Chain Technologies, Capgemini