Breaking down functional silos to create transparent and responsive end-to-end supply chains has long been an intractable supply chain challenge, but many companies are finding success using a control tower concept that gets everyone working off the same plan and focused on the same outcome. To learn more about this approach, SupplyChainBrain convened a Power Lunch"”a roundtable discussion"”with four experts in the field: Paul Bittinger, former supply chain transformation manager, Procter & Gamble (now retired); Lora Cecere, founder and CEO, Supply Chain Insights; Don Gaspari, director, global materials and inventory, NCR Corp.; and Kirk Munroe, vice president of marketing, Kinaxis.

When chains listen to their customers and create localized store inventory, and then they listen more and accept online returns to any store the shopper chooses, they run into inventory train wrecks.

Robert Byrne, CEO of Terra Technology, discusses highlights of Terra's 2012 benchmarking study on forecasting, which is based on raw data collected from the major CPG companies that are Terra's customers. Byrne explains why forecast accuracy is moving in the wrong direction and what companies can do to correct this trend.

Equipment Management Service and Repair (EMSAR), a company that services and repairs health-care and medical-services equipment for clients nationwide, is providing an RFID-based solution developed by Silent Partner Technologies (SPT) for its clients to track its assets' locations.

For businesses that manufacture aerospace, pharmaceutical or other high-value items, even a single component built into a product can be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Losing track of a basket filled with parts can thus be extremely costly, due not only to each component's cost but the potential loss of production time if assembly is delayed. The solution may be RFID technology, according to Marlin Steel Wire Products, a producer of custom wire baskets and other metal products.

Tufts Medical Center, a 415-bed teaching hospital in Boston, has saved $1.5m on stents, angioplasty balloons and other implantable devices, based on information provided by a radio frequency identification inventory-management system deployed within its catheterization, electrophysiology and interventional radiology laboratories.

Zebra Technologies has put its own real-time location system (RTLS) technology to work at two of its warehouses - one in Vernon Hills, Ill., and a second in Heerenveen, the Netherlands. The solution saves time employees previously spent locating the proper place for loads of picked goods (approximately three minutes per load), says Gary Meekma, Zebra's senior manager of warehouse operations, while also reducing the amount of space required to stage each load by about 40 percent.

Acute-care facility New York Hospital Queens, located in the Flushing section of New York City, is piloting radio frequency identification technology to help it manage its inventory of medical devices and consumables, including stents, catheters and filters used within its interventional radiology unit.