Dr. Chaman L. Jain, professor of economics in the Tobin College of Business at St. John's University, talks about how the demand-planning function has changed in his decades of observing global supply chains.

Too many companies are still plagued by a "siloed" mentality which keeps various functions from collaborating fully on demand planning. But Arnold Mark Wells, principal of End-to-End Analytics, sees reason for hope.

SAP AG has introduced a series of mobile applications for business users and consumers. The new tools provide real-time access to human resources, finance, sales and mobile commerce functions.

Briggs Healthcare develops and markets products that are designed to improve clinical outcomes and reduce operating costs for more than 50,000 customers in the senior care, home care, acute care, physician and retail markets. "Having the right product at the right place and time and at the lowest cost is very important to us," says Brad Mueller, vice president of supply chain solutions.

The electronic industry has always been characterized by high variability in supply and demand. With recent natural disasters such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and flooding in the parts of the U.S., the problem has only become more acute. Tackling it requires state-of-the-art systems, strong management commitment, good customer service, well-run business processes, integration among functions and effective inventory-control procedures, says Dave Lentz, director of innovation and solutions marketing with Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas.

Arena Solutions, a vendor of cloud-based product lifecycle-management (PLM) software for managing bills of materials (BOMs), has forged a partnership with Octopart, a search engine for electronic parts.

GT Nexus and Kinaxis have formed a partnership to provide customers with a unified, cloud-based planning and execution platform.