There's an episode of The Office TV show involving a prank on a hapless colleague in which the victim's desk contents - his stapler, pencil cup, plate, even his wallet-are stashed inside the office vending machine. It does not occur to any of the sitcom's characters to turn these hijinks into a business model, but now someone has.

We're all familiar with maturity curves, but how helpful are they really? Telling a company how mature they are, based on academic factors, means next to nothing if it's not rooted in practical applications that relate to a procurement professional’s day-to-day work.

ThomasNet and the Institute for Supply Management are partnering to spotlight millennials whose initiative and leadership are strengthening procurement and supply chain management.

A shift is underway for distributors of industrial supplies and the e-commerce experience they provide to their customers. In 2013, more than 63 percent of industrial supply buyers said they made purchases online, with half of those purchasers spending at least 50 percent of their annual budget with suppliers who have an e-commerce platform.

Analyst Insight: Complex executive priorities and deeply embedded functional tendencies present challenging organizational dynamics to the chemical supply chain leader. These challenges require a combination of operational effectiveness and leadership vision and influence to establish a hierarchy of layered and synchronized governance processes that connect differentiated execution to segmented demand fulfillment strategies. Features of this integrated capability will include supply and demand visibility with analytics that support agile decision making to manage and mitigate complex constraints. - Paul Lord, Research Director, Gartner