Analyst Insight: In 2010, as we began to offer a supply chain risk management class at Lehigh, our body of knowledge continued to expand and migrated into a very effective methodology to review, evaluate and benchmark a company's end-to-end supply chain maturity and inherent risk. The methodology encompassed 100 questions-of-discovery across 10 tenets of the supply chain resulting in a Red, Yellow & Green "spider diagram" profile of a company's supply chain maturity and inherent risk. – Gregory L. Schlegel, Founder, The Supply Chain Risk Management Consortium, and Adjunct Professor, Supply Chain Risk Management, Lehigh University

Analyst Insight: Delivering a seamless customer experience will demand a more comprehensive approach to inventory visibility across the entire supply chain. Gone are the days of "offline and online" inventories. Retailers must determine how they will create and leverage one view of all of their inventories, where any location now may become a source to fulfill a customer's order. – Melanie Nuce, Vice President of Apparel and General Merchandise, GS1 US

In the late 1680s, a group of ship owners, merchants and ships' captains - in essence, the supply chain managers of the day - transformed global commerce by "inventing" business insurance. In 2015, the insurance industry will return the favor by supporting supply chain innovation through sharing the tools that insurers have depended on to predict and quantify risk. How and why (now) will that happen? And what do supply chain stakeholders need to do?

Analyst Insight: The term "supply chain visibility" is bandied about, but it lacks a consistent definition. There are many forms of visibility and companies use the term with many different definitions. The first step is getting clear on the definition, and the second is gaining clarity on the technology options. While most companies have made progress in supply chain visibility within the four walls of the enterprise, today, supply chain visibility in the extended supply chain is still in its infancy. – Lora Cecere, Founder of Supply Chain Insights

Analyst Insight: Richard Branson said, "Succeeding in business is about making connections." Our businesses today have thousands of connections with customers, suppliers, and within our own enterprises. The sheer magnitude of supplier connections can be complex in a global business: thousands of suppliers x hundreds of interactions per supplier x at least one element to be discussed between two of the parties equals many connections we must sort through to get to the heart of our relationships and manage them effectively. – Mickey North Rizza, VP Strategic Services, BravoSolution

Last year, I attended a thought-provoking supply chain conference hosted by an industry analyst organization. The agenda was packed with interesting supply chain topics - cost-to-serve strategies, supply network optimization, S&OP integration, demand shaping tactics, etc. However, the event gave almost no attention to the foundation upon which advanced supply chain planning and execution strategies rest: supply chain integration.

Analyst Insight: If supply chains are not planned, then they evolve and often become overly costly, risky and ineffective in serving customers. However, today's dynamic markets require much more than routine planning. Each mega-process in the end-to-end supply chain (Plan, Buy, Make, Move, Distribute and Sell) is undergoing change at an unprecedented rate. Leading solutions lie in advanced planning strategies and methods for both depth and breadth. While today's top companies understand this, the majority are not yet advanced in supply chain planning. – Gene Tyndall, Executive Vice President, Tompkins International

Analyst Insight: Call it Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP), Integrated Business Planning (IBP), Sales, Inventory & Operations Planning (SIOP) or Demand Driven - it doesn't matter. Arduous to implement, these processes continue to under-perform considering the political, operating and capital investment made. Why? In most organizations the daily working capital decisions are made by planners and schedulers using custom spreadsheets and tribal knowledge. It's time to transform the process, and let's call it S&OP 3.0. – Rich Sherman, author and founder at Gold & Domas Research

Analyst Insight: The last two years have seen a rush to provide store fulfillment services - similar to the efforts to deploy e-commerce FCs back in 1998-2000. To date, store fulfillment initiatives have largely been tactical, technology-driven initiatives chartered to leverage existing applications-integration in order to support “save the sale" functionality as well as offload growing FC volumes to the retail store. The coming years will experience a "financial-efficiency" driven effort to maximize profit margin and optimize network inventory efficiency under the new age of constrained IT investment. – Kevin Hume, Principal, Tompkins International

Analyst Insight: Information technology tools have played a large role in advancing the efficiency of product development over the past 20 years. In terms of helping organizations opening lines of communication and better integrating product development with essential supply chain and manufacturing processes, however, the impact has been less impressive. – Pierfrancesco Manenti, Vice President, Research, SCM World