At 29 years of age, Katy Conrad, site lead at Shell's Geismar Chemical Plant, is a terrific ambassador for her profession. She loves everything about supply management - working with smart engineering and business professionals, solving tough problems, and making a bottom-line impact. At Shell, she has delivered significant savings, built a regional B2B sourcing strategy, and held an overseas assignment.

The global market for lithium-ion batteries for vehicles is expected to grow from $7.8bn in 2015 to $30.6bn in 2024, according to a report from Navigant Research.

In June this year a robot crushed a man to death in a Volkswagen factory in Germany. The 22-year-old maintenance worker became trapped between a large robotic arm and a metal plate, in an area usually off-bounds to humans.

The Reshoring Initiative recently announced a program in partnership with Walmart to help companies manufacture more consumer products in the United States.

It's time to stop thinking of your supply chain as an endless stream of entities, all nicely linked together; it is much more complex than that.

When President Barack Obama said last September that he would get tough on companies that avoid tax through "inversions" - merging with or buying foreign firms so as to shift their domicile abroad - some wondered if this would end a wave of corporate emigration.

For most of the past three decades, private equity firms and other investors have relied on two simple questions to assess the supply chains of the companies in which they've invested: Are our companies leveraging low-cost country supply sources and are they keeping supply chain costs in check? Deeper inquiries have always seemed unnecessary, so private equity firms and investors have focused on other aspects of the businesses they own to drive value.