In an effort to drive better efficiency and improve the utilization of the labor force, the most valuable asset in any warehouse, today's Best-in-Class are investing in and creating seamless integration with automation and material handling equipment.

Nothing gets software vendors more excited than new government regulations. Sarbanes-Oxley was a boon to enterprise software companies a few years ago. It allowed them to walk down the hall from the CIO's office and talk to the chief financial officer, the person who controls the company's purse strings. Similarly, TMS vendors welcomed the new Hours of Service regulations when they first went into effect in 2003. It was part of the "perfect storm" shippers and carriers were facing at the time (along with rising fuel costs and capacity constraints) that served as a catalyst for TMS sales. The latest regulation that has vendors seeing dollar signs is the Importer Security Filing (ISF) rule, better known to folks in the industry as "10+2."

Today's economic uncertainty has brought transportation and distribution operations back to the board room. The fluidity of the supply chain is critical to the long-term success of the organization and should be on everyone's mind.

Expect shipper-carrier relations in 2009 to take a more shipper-centric shape with the shippers dictating the terms. While this is probably not the best long-term strategy, short-term cost pressures will drive many shippers to behave as if this is 1999 and not 2009.

Over the next decade, integration of sensor networks will provide a wide variety of real-time data to improve various aspects of business activity and public life-from highway maintenance to healthcare delivery, from energy peaks to emergency services, and from intermodal freight to intelligent transit. Companies that access and leverage these emerging systems and communities early could realize not only a step improvement in supply chain visibility but also enhanced profiles of their mobile customer base.

To improve supply chain resiliency, companies need to include risk considerations in their supply chain network design efforts, sales and operations planning, and inventory planning; on the execution side, they need to improve logistics and transportation management, secure alternative supply chain partners, and ensure proactive alerting process and response management for disruptions.

Multi-enterprise supply chain management solutions are successful when companies are able to achieve large-scale, global adoption with their trading partners, overcoming both technical and business change management challenges. Software as a service solutions play an important role in enabling multi-enterprise business networks.