Mike Landry, president of Barkawi Management Consultants, North America, explains the "control tower" approach to supply chain management and why he believes this approach can enable companies to go beyond incremental improvements to real transformational change.

When integrating its two major business units, First Solar partnered with Kinaxis to provide supply and demand planning capabilities, says Shellie Molina, vice president-global supply chain.

Pier Luigi Sigismondi, chief supply chain officer of Unilever, enumerates the ways in which the company's supply chain adds value to the business. He also talks about issues of sustainability and supply-chain segmentation.

At the same time that supply chains are becoming increasingly global and complex, customers are expecting faster than ever service, says Vijay Subramanian, president of Prana Consulting.

Eric O'Daffer, research director with Gartner, joins us for an update on the major issues affecting the healthcare supply chain, including the potential impact of healthcare reform.

Breaking down functional silos to create transparent and responsive end-to-end supply chains has long been an intractable supply chain challenge, but many companies are finding success using a control tower concept that gets everyone working off the same plan and focused on the same outcome. To learn more about this approach, SupplyChainBrain convened a Power Lunch"”a roundtable discussion"”with four experts in the field: Paul Bittinger, former supply chain transformation manager, Procter & Gamble (now retired); Lora Cecere, founder and CEO, Supply Chain Insights; Don Gaspari, director, global materials and inventory, NCR Corp.; and Kirk Munroe, vice president of marketing, Kinaxis.

NetSuite Inc. has acquired Retail Anywhere, a provider of multichannel retail-management services.

QAD Inc. has developed new demand-planning capabilities as an add-on to it its QAD Enterprise Applications suite.