Even the best software package won't yield results unless companies engage in detailed operations research prior to implementation, says Jean Belanger, chief executive officer of Reddworks Corp.

With high customer expectations for service and the need for organizations to secure business continuity, businesses must develop a collaborative approach to supply chain management. Your business must be able to orchestrate suppliers, assemblers, and distributors, creating a singular view of goods and services among all entities that touch the supply chain.

Once we were discussing how supply chains are designed when someone made an insightful comment: "The vast majority of supply chains are not designed. They just happen. Their current form is the cumulative result of hundreds of mostly uncoordinated individual decisions made over many years or decades." The same could be said about enterprise application integration for many companies, in spite of the earnest efforts of enterprise IT planners and architects.

"Collaboration" and "supply chain" go hand in hand, or you might think they should. But there are two kinds of collaboration with respect to supply chains. While many companies are focused on working with suppliers to arrive at more efficient and effective solutions, studies have repeatedly shown that far fewer work cross-functionally inside the organization to achieve the same result.