Analyst Insight: Lately, activity in horizontal collaboration has increased. Although this is still not a scalable practice, the number of studies and pilot projects are growing. While many variations of collaboration exist, all significantly impact transportation management. - Bill Loftis, Senior Principal, Tompkins International

Analyst Insight: Spend under management and compliance rates are considered key metrics to measure the success of almost any spend management program. Companies that try to achieve those by fiat alone will invariably fall short of their goals. Purchasing organizations are much more likely to succeed if they provide tools and systems that actually make the lives of their business users (the ones who make the purchase decisions) easier, rather than simply piling on more administrative work for the end user. - Bill McBeath, Chief Research Officer, ChainLink Research

Analyst Insight: The software market for services has changed and is rapidly evolving. Overlap of features and functions often confuse organizations and consequently, they end up selecting the wrong type of software that they require. Organizations must be aware that the market for professional services is differentiated by professional services automation and project management and is further separated by full ERP suites or point solutions. -- Dylan Persaud, Managing Director, Eval-Source

Analyst Insight: Innovative and strategic supply chain segmentation is a key strategy for effective supply chain analysis, enabling greater responsiveness and the ability to focus resources. Competition requires a better identification of key supply chain segments, considering that 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of items. An additional factor adding complexity is that increasingly manufacturers are adding services as part of their offerings - termed "servitization." Effective segmentation is the key to managing these complexities. - Nada R. Sanders, Professor of Supply Chain Management and Iacocca Chair, Lehigh University

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: Based on a survey of 160 supply chain leaders in a recent webinar conducted by Steelwedge, we found that companies captured a whopping 70 percent more data (product, supply, demand and finance) to manage their organizations in 2012. Yet, 77 percent of these businesses are not actually leveraging this data in their S&OP processes, thereby leaving "blind spots" in their decision making processes around critical supply/demand trade-offs. - Nari Viswanathan, Vice President of Product Management, Steelwedge

Analyst Insight: Neither a lack of cogent definitions re: what these services and technologies are nor confusion in pricing models is slowing down interest in cloud, SaaS and on-demand solutions. Our research shows a consistent increase in buyer adoption of enterprise and consumer applications - cloud-accessible - from desk top, smartphones and tablets of all size companies in all industries. - Ann Grackin, CEO, ChainLink Research

Analyst Insight: For the past 30 years, sales and operations planning (S&OP) has been espoused by the Oliver Wight organization based on its founder's concepts. It has manifested itself to include inventory (SIOP) and has morphed into integrated business planning (IBP). However, only within the last five years, has it been heralded and crossed the chasm to mainstream business practice. We think it may only be the tip of the iceberg though, not the core solution to step-change improved performance. - Rich Sherman, Supply Chain Discipline Expert at Trissential