You don't have to look too far, or listen too intently, to detect signs of digital disruption these days. We're in the midst of a veritable eruption of disruption, taking place across the business landscape and radically reshaping everything from customer interactions to internal processes to extended supply chains. Needless to say, it's far better to be the disrupter than one of the rudely disrupted.

IT departments need to watch out for business units or even individual workers going rogue and bypassing IT to go straight to the cloud.

Throughout the logistics industry, food is one of the most demanding goods moved around the world. Statistics also show that it is also one of the most disposed products worldwide in relation to the produced quantity with 30 to 50 percent of food going to waste. The highest portion is on the consumers' side. But In the supply chain, a non-stop cold chain monitoring is the major instrument for food staying fresh and not rotting ahead of time. There are already several solutions in the field to collect data to monitor the cold chain. But most of these solutions are costly to install and to maintain and therefore only suitable for high-priced products such as pharmaceuticals. Wireless sensors that use the energy harvesting principle now overcome these challenges and open the door for a complete traceability of food at affordable costs.

Gartner Inc. has released the findings from its 10th annual Supply Chain Top 25, and for the seventh year in a row Apple has topped the list. McDonald's took second place, and Amazon came in third.

Today, businesses of all stripes are sowing the seeds of Big Data everywhere. And if we think Big Data is big, just think how that data multiplies and branches out when rooted in the multifaceted field of supply chain management.

Gone are the days when outsourced manufacturing was a supplement to your business. Today, it is your business. Building quality products quickly, while remaining nimble to address market feedback or unexpected manufacturing snafus, can be the difference between success and failure.