There's no doubt that the digital supply chain is of great benefit to a company, but we need to look at the world of social media to learn how to maximize use of digitalization, says Trevor Miles, vice president of thought leadership at Kinaxis.

Radio frequency identification provides an opportunity for the food industry to better monitor the health of animals and the storage of meat before it is provided to consumers, says German food industry company Tönnies Livestock. The company's business group has developed an ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) system for tracking pigs using a passive RFID-enabled ear tag and readers, as well as its own software to manage the collected data.

The ideal center of excellence not only supports internal teams at a company but advocates for customers, says Leah McGuire, director of the Kinaxis Center of Excellence.

The task of linking systems of any company with truly global reach is difficult enough to begin with, says Lindsey Kathmann, supply chain analyst at TE Connectivity, but complexity is heightened when the enterprise is structured into separate business units, some with their own spinoffs.

Merging two companies is seldom easy, but it's even more difficult when their supply chains are highly dissimilar, says Jim Calarese, director of supply chain systems at Sanofi Genzyme.

For Xilinx Inc., a supplier of programmable logic devices, the focus is more on speed than optimization, says Alex Brown, vice president of supply chain.