BJC HealthCare joins with Cardinal Health and Cook Medical in a three-way pilot to apply RFID tags to items at the supplier stage. Will their success goad a technologically backward industry to follow suit, and eliminate billions of dollars of waste from the supply chain?

Globalization and evolving social, economic and regulatory trends have elevated corporate competition to a new level altogether. For procurement departments in particular, cutting costs, doing more with less, and running agile operations are the new standards for success.

With their operating budget expected to grow by just 2.7 percent this year, procurement leaders are focusing their transformation efforts on cultivating procurement's role as a trusted advisor, investing in next-generation training and development, and harnessing big data.