Procurement leaders are expanding their priorities for 2014, moving beyond a historic emphasis on reducing purchase costs and adding focus on expanding and deepening the scope of spend influence as well as supporting supplier-led product innovation, according to 2014 Procurement Key Issues research from The Hackett Group Inc.

A report from IDC Manufacturing Insights evaluates the progression of commerce networks for manufacturers from traditional point-to-point communications to collaborative commerce networks that support many-to-many interactions among manufacturers and their trading partners.

While retailers are facing challenges in delivering the reporting functionality that business users need to enable data-driven decision-making, they are optimistic about Big Data's ability to provide breakthroughs in analysis capabilities across a number of retail processes, says a study by 1010data Inc. In fact, almost all surveyed executives (96 percent) agreed that Big Data initiatives are important in helping retailers stay competitive. They said Big Data insights are most beneficial for merchandising (53 percent) and marketing (48 percent), followed by store operations (42 percent), e-commerce (42 percent), supply chain (27 percent), finance (23 percent), and loss prevention (21 percent).