Supply Chain Management is a "tale of two cities", Leader City and Laggard City. Residents of Leader City, according to benchmarks from APQC, outperform their median competitors with an overwhelming cost and performance advantage. As you navigate the journey to Leader City, at some point, you are going to have to obtain management commitment as evidenced by the fact that we've all been to dozens of case study presentations at conferences over the years. What do they all have in common? You have to have management commitment to be successful. What they never tell you is how to get it! Here's one of the secrets to gaining management commitment that Rich Sherman reveals in his new book. Material excerpted from Supply Chain Transformation: Practical Roadmap to Best Practice Results, by Richard Sherman, 2012. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

Is it a waste of time to make economic forecasts? Even the most respected prognosticators are wrong as often as they're right. And the most sweeping changes? Hardly anyone ever sees them coming.

For a new report on supply chain excellence, an assistant and I waded through spreadsheet after spreadsheet of data for the last three weeks and contrasted the progress of the high-tech, consumer products, food, pharmaceutical and industrial industries. The storyline of the report is that ONLY the high-tech industry is making progress on what I call the Supply Chain Effective Frontier - effectively balancing progress on growth, profitability, cycles and complexity. The rest of the industries are either stuck or moving backwards. Consumer packaged goods, food and chemical manufacturers are stuck and pharmaceutical and industrial companies are losing ground and moving backwards.

Brent Beabout, senior vice president of supply chain with Office Depot, describes how the company slashed packaging waste by switching from corrugated cardboard to paper bags for deliveries to consumers and business. A finalist in the Supply Chain Innovation of the Year competition.