A study by the Reshoring Initiative shows that 60,000 manufacturing jobs were brought into the U.S. by a combination of reshoring and foreign direct investment in 2014, a record level and 400 percent increase since 2003.

For many manufacturers and distributors, a seamless supply chain of highly efficient and tightly integrated business processes sharing a single unified source of accurate real-time data seems an unachievable goal. That's not surprising since such organizations are struggling to gain control over their entire supply chain using a mix of disparate systems that fail to fully mesh with one another creating silos of outdated and unreliable information.

Cheaper, better robots will replace human workers in the world's factories at a faster pace over the next decade, pushing labor costs down 16 percent, according to the Boston Consulting Group.

The labor shortage in the supply chain and manufacturing industries has been well-documented, and increasingly so as that shortage continues to grow. Female executives at logistics services providers can't stress enough how they'd like to see more women continue to enter the supply chain workforce and break the stereotype of it being "a man’s world."