For U.S. retailers, manufacturers, importers and exporters, warehouse space is at its tightest since 2000, when the first dot-com boom was driving strong consumer spending and imports from China were beginning to surge.

Challenge: Nearly 10 percent of the world’s drug supply is counterfeit, prompting many countries to set rigid guidelines to track and trace pharmaceuticals across the supply chain. Achieving compliance is often a huge undertaking for pharmaceutical manufacturers and 3PL providers.

Procurement teams needs to create a vision for how they are going to deal with digital transformation.

Investor interest in building and acquiring warehouses in the age of Amazon.com Inc. is overheating, and there might be more distribution centers created than there will be tenants to fill them, billionaire Sam Zell said.

Challenge: A company's engineering and sourcing departments were siloed and lacking access to historical information and accurate market data (pricing, availability and risk). The engineering department partially designs based on performance, but the bills of materials (BOMs) sent to the sourcing department were not procurable. The company needed access to the right data to increase contract negotiating power and reduce product launch risks due to inventory and manufacturing issues.

For Prologis Inc., the world's largest warehouse owner, the biggest challenge to growth has been acquiring land in the markets most important to its e-commerce tenants. The solution: Buy a rival.

When Bert Hooper brings on new workers at TechStyle Fashion Group’s 450,000 square-foot warehouse in Perris, California, he tells them, “If you know how to use a smartphone and you know how to use an app, you can do about any operation that we have in our facility.”

Style trends are moving faster than ever in an age when a shopper can spot an outfit on Instagram and buy it with just a few clicks. That immediacy is prompting some in the fashion industry to experiment with a business model some are calling “click, buy and make.”