As tainted-food scandals go, it wasn't so bad. The discovery early this year of unlabeled horse meat in European food products wasn't for the most part a safety issue. It was a violation of cultural norms, to be sure, as well as a truth-in-packaging problem. Most of all, it was a supply-chain failure.

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Perry Santia, senior vice president of Genpact, provides the "big picture" of how high-tech supply chains are coping with the challenges of serving customers today.

Companies say they are in dire need of competent supply and demand planners, but the requirements of that position today are so varied that you wonder whether a single person exists who can do the job. It calls for strong math and statistical skills, obviously, but a good planner must also be able to communicate well across the multiple "silos" of an organization. The right candidate will have a deep understanding of the requirements of manufacturing, logistics, marketing, sales and finance. Then there's the necessity of reaching outside company walls to suppliers and customers, to ensure that all parties are in agreement about what the demand forecast should be. Who are these freakishly talented individuals? And where can they be found?

Take a close look at any supply chain - even a single entity within it - and you're likely to uncover a hodgepodge of disciplines, each with its own method for forecasting demand, and each convinced of its superiority over everyone else's. So it only makes sense that companies would dream of coming up with a single forecast upon which all departments could agree.