Extreme commodity price volatility has become the norm. To cope, successful sourcing professionals must deeply understand the commodity markets. This means knowing the current and expected industry capacity for delivering that commodity, current and emerging sources of demand, and trading speculation trends.

AMR Research expects shared services organizations and outsourcing delivery models to be a crucial vehicle for reducing sourcing and procurement overhead expenses. This will be enabled by a labor arbitrage, centralization of resources, tighter efficiencies in managed spend, improved process acumen and access to new technologies. These technologies, however, will see a shift from traditional license approaches to a more economical, integrated SaaS approach.

The global credit crunch is jeopardizing the financial health of our supply chains. In 2009, companies should reassess suppliers' financial stability and implement processes to spot operational red flags that are early warning signals of financial stress.

When the competition is no longer among individual companies but among entire supply chains, every area of end-to-end cost reduction needs to be explored. Financial supply chain optimization has helped leading companies make their whole supply chain more competitive with the introduction of more advanced supply chain finance practices and automated transaction processing. Finance, supply chain, and procurement groups need to collaboratively explore how to use supply chain finance to reduce supply chain costs.

Because of margin and market growth pressures, life sciences supply chains are more dynamic than ever before. In 2009, best practice companies will continue to put in place data analysis processes and "human knowledge" collection procedures to spot red flags and safety risks in their end-to-end supply chains.

The more information the sourcing and product development teams can share simultaneously, the more efficiently apparel manufacturers can serve their ever-changing customer needs. One way to make this possible is to establish organic integration through the fusion of sourcing and product lifecycle management within your existing enterprise framework.

Aerospace and defense companies face an uncertain world in 2009 with a new presidential administration and a looming financial crisis. Supply chain professionals have a unique opportunity to deliver value to the business by bringing scale through an innovative and reliable partner network. Leaders will put the talent in place that can move beyond the traditional reactionary supply chain organization to one that helps achieve the goals of the business.