Extreme commodity price volatility has become the norm. To cope, successful sourcing professionals must deeply understand the commodity markets. This means knowing the current and expected industry capacity for delivering that commodity, current and emerging sources of demand, and trading speculation trends.

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.

The global credit crunch is jeopardizing the financial health of our supply chains. In 2009, companies should reassess suppliers' financial stability and implement processes to spot operational red flags that are early warning signals of financial stress.

Because of margin and market growth pressures, life sciences supply chains are more dynamic than ever before. In 2009, best practice companies will continue to put in place data analysis processes and "human knowledge" collection procedures to spot red flags and safety risks in their end-to-end supply chains.

The instability of the international container shipping sector, capacity withdrawal on some routes and "slow steaming" practices will expose exporters and importers to greater risks.