Once we were discussing how supply chains are designed when someone made an insightful comment: "The vast majority of supply chains are not designed. They just happen. Their current form is the cumulative result of hundreds of mostly uncoordinated individual decisions made over many years or decades." The same could be said about enterprise application integration for many companies, in spite of the earnest efforts of enterprise IT planners and architects.

"Collaboration" and "supply chain" go hand in hand, or you might think they should. But there are two kinds of collaboration with respect to supply chains. While many companies are focused on working with suppliers to arrive at more efficient and effective solutions, studies have repeatedly shown that far fewer work cross-functionally inside the organization to achieve the same result.

Businesses today are just as committed to cost reduction as they were in the depths of the global recession. The main difference now is that many are focused on cost-cutting as a way to drive growth, rather than as a way to survive or avoid insolvency. This was one of the key findings from Deloitte's third biennial cost survey of companies in the Fortune 1000.

Business leaders in the United States showed signs of increased optimism in the performance of the nation's economy in the first quarter of 2013, according to the latest data from the Grant Thornton International Business Report. The report also showed higher global business optimism.

Most procurement functions are covering the basics of incorporating corporate social responsibility (CSR) processes, but this effort is more tactical than strategic. According to a recent Procurement Leaders study, 82 percent of procurement functions have managed to include CSR in their supplier selection and evaluation criteria.