As a leading contract manufacturer of electronics, Celestica works with a diverse supply base comprised of thousands of vendors. Six years ago, the company began a major initiative to gain better visibility and control of supplier performance, an effort that led to creation of a proprietary supplier collaboration tool known as Live Share.

LeanLogistics, a provider of transportation-management system (TMS) software, has adapted its On-Demand TMS SuiteApp for the NetSuite SuiteCloud computing platform.

Terra Technology has added to its Demand Sensing product suite with the introduction of a Long-Term Demand Sensing (LDS) application.

The Big Data space is filled with so many posers, fakers and wannabes, it's ridiculous. Everybody is trying to catch the Big Data wave by getting their name attached to this hot new trend.

People, processes and technology are the three key areas where companies are experiencing "pain points" in their forecasting efforts, says Eric Ball, solutions manager with Avercast LLC. The people side is especially vital, given the trend within many companies of "trying to do more with less." Too often businesses rely on a new piece of technology to improve their forecasting, ignoring the need for humans to run the system. "Coupled with budget cutbacks left and right, developing personnel is a tremendous issue," he says.

About two years ago, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield implemented a self-service business intelligence platform to aggregate and analyze vast amounts of data from multiple repositories scattered throughout the company.

Briggs Healthcare develops and markets products that are designed to improve clinical outcomes and reduce operating costs for more than 50,000 customers in the senior care, home care, acute care, physician and retail markets. "Having the right product at the right place and time and at the lowest cost is very important to us," says Brad Mueller, vice president of supply chain solutions.

The electronic industry has always been characterized by high variability in supply and demand. With recent natural disasters such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and flooding in the parts of the U.S., the problem has only become more acute. Tackling it requires state-of-the-art systems, strong management commitment, good customer service, well-run business processes, integration among functions and effective inventory-control procedures, says Dave Lentz, director of innovation and solutions marketing with Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas.

Arena Solutions, a vendor of cloud-based product lifecycle-management (PLM) software for managing bills of materials (BOMs), has forged a partnership with Octopart, a search engine for electronic parts.

GE Capital Fleet Services has launched IntelliGauge, a mobile fuel and carbon-dioxide calculator which allows users to compare the fuel costs of their current vehicles against future models.