Analyst Insight: Richard Branson said, "Succeeding in business is about making connections." Our businesses today have thousands of connections with customers, suppliers, and within our own enterprises. The sheer magnitude of supplier connections can be complex in a global business: thousands of suppliers x hundreds of interactions per supplier x at least one element to be discussed between two of the parties equals many connections we must sort through to get to the heart of our relationships and manage them effectively. – Mickey North Rizza, VP Strategic Services, BravoSolution

Analyst Insight: In 2009, Dr. Robert Trent, Lehigh Supply Chain Management Department Chair, and I began to discuss supply chain risk in terms of how it was negatively impacting companies around the world. This dialogue led to capturing as much information available on the subject, codifying, classifying and developing a framework which became a graduate class in supply chain risk management and ultimately a new book, just launched, entitled Supply Chain Risk Management: An Emerging Discipline. – Gregory L. Schlegel, Founder, The Supply Chain Risk Management Consortium, and Adjunct Professor, Supply Chain Risk Management, Lehigh University

Analyst Insight: In optimizing their global supply chains, companies focus on quality, cost and service metrics and trying to maximize return on their investments in supply chain projects. What is often overlooked is the major impact that supply chains have on intangible capital of a company – its corporate reputation. – Viktoria Sadlovska, Research Director at Reputation Institute

Analyst Insight: The complexity of modern supply chains introduces a wide variety of risks into business operations. Supply chain professionals primarily worry about logistics and planning challenges, but a host of legal exposures can come into play as well. The management of these vendor risks typically falls to legal and compliance stakeholders, but ultimately impacts supply chain activities. This creates a unique need for integration between solutions supporting risk and supply chain management. – David Houlihan, Principal Analyst at Blue Hill Research

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Analyst Insight: If supply chains are not planned, then they evolve and often become overly costly, risky and ineffective in serving customers. However, today's dynamic markets require much more than routine planning. Each mega-process in the end-to-end supply chain (Plan, Buy, Make, Move, Distribute and Sell) is undergoing change at an unprecedented rate. Leading solutions lie in advanced planning strategies and methods for both depth and breadth. While today's top companies understand this, the majority are not yet advanced in supply chain planning. – Gene Tyndall, Executive Vice President, Tompkins International

Analyst Insight: Call it Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP), Integrated Business Planning (IBP), Sales, Inventory & Operations Planning (SIOP) or Demand Driven - it doesn't matter. Arduous to implement, these processes continue to under-perform considering the political, operating and capital investment made. Why? In most organizations the daily working capital decisions are made by planners and schedulers using custom spreadsheets and tribal knowledge. It's time to transform the process, and let's call it S&OP 3.0. – Rich Sherman, author and founder at Gold & Domas Research

Analyst Insight: Sales and operations planning (S&OP) has been evolving for over three decades; its most recent iteration is Integrated Business Planning (IBP). While many companies struggle to derive full value from S&OP/IBP, those that excel at it have gone beyond simply balancing supply and demand. Their IBP processes support better, faster and more profit-focused decisions and liberate untapped profit potential at key points in the supply chain. – Jim Snyder, Managing Director, and Brad Householder, Partner, PwC Advisory Practice