In today's competitive global marketplace, manufacturers face a daunting challenge: ensuring production moves seamlessly within integrated supply chains while improving compliance and minimizing costs. To do so, plant managers need a complete view of operations, inventory and resource allocation - and that's exactly what business intelligence dashboards deliver.

Analyst Insight: The growth of e-commerce, the evolution of consumer expectations, and the globalization of e-commerce have resulted in many changes in the requirements of retail supply chains. These changes demand that retail supply chains handle more volume, quicker, and around the world. Supply chains are at a crossroads to either constrain an organization’s success or to enable the organization’s profitable growth. - Jim Tompkins, CEO, Tompkins International

Analyst Insight: The next defining opportunity for supply chain is in digital operations. The scope of digital operations is enormous, and it presents amazing opportunities. But failure - either from moving too fast or too slow - may lead to redundancy or, in extreme cases, extinction. Companies must clearly understand where they are today to drive change successfully and must move with purpose. If they cannot, they will be history. - Peter Anderson, Principal, Advisory, Ernst & Young LLP, & Chekyiu Ng, Senior Manager, Advisory, Ernst & Young LLP

For many major B2B enterprises, logistics networks have never been more complex. The increasing prevalence of operations that are global - with growing numbers of production sites and clients that could be anywhere on earth - has introduced challenges that didn't exist to the same degree at an earlier time. The good news is that there has also never before been a moment when there were more tools and more opportunities to optimize logistics costs than now.

Organizations are faced with many critical challenges - including rapidly changing technology, environmental risks, regulatory and legal requirements, major shifts in markets, ethical breaches, and big data and cybersecurity issues - that threaten their long-term success and sustainability.

Dematic, a supplier of software and services for supply-chain optimization, has completed its acquisition of Reddwerks Corp.

NetSuite Inc., a provider of cloud-based software for managing financial and omnichannel commerce, has made a number of product enhancements to NetSuite OneWorld.