The evolution of service oriented architecture has enabled significant opportunities for companies to expand their existing solutions without making large-scale upgrades and re-implementations. However, these solutions tend to be more suitable only for larger companies rather than mid-sized ones due to the initial investment needed to enable these solutions.

The S&OP process should be complemented by a strong root cause analysis and execution framework that ensures that the S&OP plan is continuously tracked with respect to the financial goals set forth by the company. In other words, the S&OP lifecycle should precede the financial reporting lifecycle of a company and should be in lock-step.

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.

The focus on green network design allows companies to reach to the core of the green supply chain movement by optimizing resources and reducing waste.

Only 31 percent of organizations are looking at inventory management as a competitive differentiator versus the rest looking at it as a cost impactor. By adjusting the existing processes to configure a closed-loop inventory management process, organizations can gain significant improvement in customer service levels and reduced inventory carrying costs. The concept of closed-loop inventory management involves seven steps within the process: analyze demand, segment inventory, optimize inventory, replenish inventory, track inventory, manage events, and responsively execute.

High-tech organizations have evolved their supply chains that specialized in flow of materials into supply-demand networks where information flow is more critical to manage. This has resulted in high-tech supply chains to be asset lite and information heavy. There is a need to cash this information into tangible business value through the creation of a flexible and responsive supply chain.

There is nearly unanimous recognition of the need for supply chain transformation driven by factors such as the globalization of supply, increasing competitive pressures, and dwindling product life cycles from companies. This transformation's initial state is the linear supply chains of the past and the final state is a dynamic multi-enterprise business network.

Supply chain executives in the process industry sector are primarily concerned with being able to drive volumes in accordance with previously established plans, as well as with maximizing utilization of assets. Asset-intensive manufacturing operations are a key common theme across process industries.

The elongation of the supply chain on both ends of the spectrum has resulted in a phenomenon where companies are able to compete at a global level for customers. Companies that were previously handicapped by lack of channel partners, high levels of investment in advertising and marketing are able to leverage the internet and compete with their larger competitors. In other words, globalization has resulted in increased customer centricity.

Aberdeen's research shows point-of-sale transaction data from retail locations is still a hurdle for 66 percent of manufacturers. The low levels of transaction data sharing cause increased complexities in tracking promotion effectiveness at the store or field level.