U.S. factories produce about 75 percent of what the country consumes, but the right decisions by both business and political leaders could push that to 95 percent, say University of Michigan researchers.

Downstream demand signals have been available in the retail world for some time now, but it has taken a while for suppliers to take full advantage of them. Mark Kremblewski, global business expert in demand planning with Procter & Gamble, likens the situation to the mining industry, which trades in deposits of both high- and low-grade ore. The latter type is more plentiful, but it's the first that offers the biggest payback from a better use of demand data in unpredictable situations.

Gartner Inc. has released the findings from its eighth annual Supply Chain Top 25, its initiative to raise awareness of the supply chain discipline and how it impacts the business, and once again Apple topped the list. The supply chain top five included two other mainstays; Dell and P+G; and two that are newer to the ranking, but have been rising steadily; Amazon and McDonald's.

With 92 percent of retailers selling online, 68 percent maintaining brick-and-mortar stores, and 64 percent utilizing catalogs, retailers are embracing a multichannel approach to meet buyer expectations and battle for market share, according to Jones Lang LaSalle's latest report, Retail 3.0: the evolution of multi-channel retail distribution.

Sysco Corp. has operated very successfully for many years as a decentralized company, distributing $40bn annually in food and associated products to restaurants, schools and other meal-serving organizations. The company felt that it could do better in terms of logistics, however, and decided to centralize inbound transportation operations that previously were distributed among its 70 business units.

Since today's global business structures are bigger than the enterprise, we are bombarded by the power of social networking for the enterprise. But with several mega-enterprise software firms clearly committed to incorporating social networking into their solutions, the question is - isn't it time to abandon ERP in favor of a new solution? A new platform? A new software category for business? Or is enterprise social networking an element of the enterprise-ERP-package?

As the former CFO of such companies as Sprint, Eastman Kodak Co. and Unisys Corp., as well as vice president of finance of General Electric Co.'s plastics division, Robert Brust's management philosophy was to bring procurement into the finance department, at times meeting daily with the purchasing team to go over expenditures line by line.

Supply management professionals are uniquely positioned to influence a company's environmental sustainability efforts as well as the performance of supply base partners in this area. But where are the standards and metrics?

Freeing data from functional silos and making it available to decision-makers throughout the supply chain in real time is the elusive key to true, end-to-end supply chain optimization, says Kristi Montgomery of Kenco Management Services, a third-party logistics provider.