In an effort to drive better efficiency and improve the utilization of the labor force, the most valuable asset in any warehouse, today's Best-in-Class are investing in and creating seamless integration with automation and material handling equipment.

Today's economic uncertainty has brought transportation and distribution operations back to the board room. The fluidity of the supply chain is critical to the long-term success of the organization and should be on everyone's mind.

Expect shipper-carrier relations in 2009 to take a more shipper-centric shape with the shippers dictating the terms. While this is probably not the best long-term strategy, short-term cost pressures will drive many shippers to behave as if this is 1999 and not 2009.

In June 2008, ARC Advisory Group conducted a web survey of 16 leading transportation management systems vendors to obtain their views on growth opportunities and market conditions. Almost 70 percent said their year-to-date sales and pipelines were larger than in 2007. This is not surprising when you consider the record fuel prices customers were dealing with at the start of the year (fuel prices had risen about 50 percent in less than a year). This led many companies to focus on transportation spend management, which led to continued investments in TMS. Then the economy stumbled.

The focus on collaboration and visibility across internal and external departments has clearly provided the Best-in-Class transportation companies with the flexibility and agility necessary to overcome the rising costs in fuel and other shipping costs.

Over the next decade, integration of sensor networks will provide a wide variety of real-time data to improve various aspects of business activity and public life-from highway maintenance to healthcare delivery, from energy peaks to emergency services, and from intermodal freight to intelligent transit. Companies that access and leverage these emerging systems and communities early could realize not only a step improvement in supply chain visibility but also enhanced profiles of their mobile customer base.

To achieve operational excellence in their global supply chain management, one of the important steps companies need to take is gaining more granular visibility into supply chain processes and beginning to use supply chain visibility data and supply chain intelligence to drive increased responsiveness in their global supply chains.

Extreme commodity price volatility has become the norm. To cope, successful sourcing professionals must deeply understand the commodity markets. This means knowing the current and expected industry capacity for delivering that commodity, current and emerging sources of demand, and trading speculation trends.

AMR Research expects shared services organizations and outsourcing delivery models to be a crucial vehicle for reducing sourcing and procurement overhead expenses. This will be enabled by a labor arbitrage, centralization of resources, tighter efficiencies in managed spend, improved process acumen and access to new technologies. These technologies, however, will see a shift from traditional license approaches to a more economical, integrated SaaS approach.

The evolution of service oriented architecture has enabled significant opportunities for companies to expand their existing solutions without making large-scale upgrades and re-implementations. However, these solutions tend to be more suitable only for larger companies rather than mid-sized ones due to the initial investment needed to enable these solutions.