Analyst Insight: Most supply chain management organizations struggle with functional and application silos that make orchestrating and synchronizing business processes across their organization near impossible. Supply chain execution convergence is an emerging Gartner concept where SCE functional silos are broken down and business processes span, optimize and synchronize across traditional functional domains. - Dwight Klappich, vice president, Gartner Inc.

Analyst Insight: Warehouse management system vendors have used the slower market demand of 2009 and 2010 to invest in improved architecture and functionality. Today, the WMS market has seen a robust return in upgrades and new solution selections. Leading WMS application providers - from integrated ERP solutions to best-of-breed suite applications - all tout upgrades in architecture, new user interfaces and robust operational support. - Kevin Hume, principal, Tompkins International

Analyst Insight: For as long as we can remember, product lifecycle management technology has evolved in an incremental way, absorbing and exploiting new technologies as they've come along and steadily gaining in capability to meet the challenges of multi-organisation product development efforts and supply chains. Currently, the PLM solutions industry is being subjected to a looming confluence of pressures that represents both a major challenge to established approaches and a substantial opportunity for harnessing new technologies to drive further benefit. - Tony Christian, principal analyst, Cambashi

Analyst Insight: In recent years, Software as a Service and hosted solutions have made some significant in-roads in the supply chain application space, but their success has been somewhat limited. Continuing IT budget and resource constraints are causing many firms to take a serious look at on-demand supply chain applications. And software vendors have responded by increasing the number and variety of services provided. This mixture is expanding the horizon of on-demand supply chain IT solutions. - Tom Singer, principal, Tompkins International

Analyst Insight: Inventory working capital reduction is a wonderful concept; however, it is important to understand all of the potential financial impacts before beginning. - Ralph Cox, principal, Tompkins International

Analyst Insight: Signing a contract and getting the business ramped up is just the beginning of an outsourcing deal. The real work is shaping the relationship and making the parties operate not only as a high-performance team, but also to allow the companies to embrace the dynamic nature of business and keep the parties aligned as "business happens." It's essential to have a flexible and cooperative governance framework. - Kate Vitasek, faculty of the University of Tennessee's Center for Executive Education, and founder, Supply Chain Visions