Integrating supply chain planning and execution is vital to today's businesses, but 80 percent of the data that most companies need to achieve this integration lies outside their four walls. Mark Cosway, vice president of industry sales at GT Nexus, explains a new approach to solving this problem.

A few years ago, DHL Express was in a downward spiral of data quality. The company had used a Microsoft costing tool deployed locally in the 200 countries in it operates. Graeme Aitkin, vice president of business controlling, said the tool used employee interviews to localize cost allocations, asking couriers how they spent their time every day. In the old days, he said, when the data wasn't available, it wasn't possible for a company to have a unified costing and pricing system across a global company.

Agentrics, a vendor of cloud-based applications to support supply-chain collaboration, has changed its name to that of its parent company, Brazil-based NeoGrid.

The notion of a "chief procurement officer" isn't new. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has had one since 1998, and the title can be found in any number of other government agencies and branches of the military. Private companies have embraced it as well, although the position hasn't enjoyed a solid footing in most C-suites for more than a decade or so. Maybe it was the success of companies like Apple, with its mastery of supply management, that convinced top executives of the need to elevate procurement to the highest levels of the organization.

Do you have powerful IT systems monitoring every movement in your supply chain? Collecting thousands of pieces of data from origin to destination? Building up a comprehensive data bank over months and years of business intelligence? So what do you do with that data?