Globalization and evolving social, economic and regulatory trends have elevated corporate competition to a new level altogether. For procurement departments in particular, cutting costs, doing more with less, and running agile operations are the new standards for success.

With their operating budget expected to grow by just 2.7 percent this year, procurement leaders are focusing their transformation efforts on cultivating procurement's role as a trusted advisor, investing in next-generation training and development, and harnessing big data.

Analyst Insight: Supply chain management ... the words are a freely exchanged contemporary coin of the realm. Yet reality has fallen short of promise because of anachronistic functional silos, presided over by vice presidents who fiercely defend their worn-out turf with an endless stream of misguided initiatives. Sales and operations planning (S&OP) was designed to bash these barriers, but it, too, has fallen short because of overmatched implementation technology. Fortunately, there is a readily available solution. – Jeff Karrenbauer, president & co-founder, INSIGHT Inc.

Analyst Insight: The greatest gap between performance and satisfaction of supply chain applications is in the area of demand planning. The reasons are many, but many are rooted in organizational and processes issues causing many people to throw in the towel too early. – Lora Cecere, Founder of Supply Chain Insights

With the Jan. 1 U.S. Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) lot-level traceability deadline now behind us, many pharmaceutical companies are turning their attention to full drug serialization. DSCSA requires that manufacturers mark packages with a product identifier, serial number, lot number, and expiration date by 2017. In that period, highly regulated packaging and distribution processes must be changed; physical equipment must be procured and operationalized; enterprise-wide IT must be implemented; and end-to-end serialization testing with supply chain partners must take place well in advance of the deadline to allow time for any necessary adjustments. Given these multi-faceted complexities, three years is an aggressive implementation time frame.