By leveraging their WMS investment and creating a more central process of control, today's Best-in-Class are spending more time fine-tuning warehouse operations to align with product or customer needs, and take their savings to the next level.

In 2009, expect most large WMS and WCS applications to remain dedicated applications tailored to a company's particular business rules, with SOA concepts appearing primarily in the integration interface.

There is nearly unanimous recognition of the need for supply chain transformation driven by factors such as the globalization of supply, increasing competitive pressures, and dwindling product life cycles from companies. This transformation's initial state is the linear supply chains of the past and the final state is a dynamic multi-enterprise business network.