Consumers Demand Delivery and Performance as the Retail Landscape Evolves

Analyst Insight: Continuous industry, business and customer demands force companies to maintain business processes in permanent evolution. Highly productive organizations strive to achieve a technological edge, business efficiency, and regulatory compliance, which must be assimilated within the organization's operations, to increase and optimize business performance. - Jorge Garcia, Senior Analyst, Technology Evaluation Centers

Some random themes and thoughts to emerge from Oracle Corp.'s Value Chain Summit in San Jose, Calif. last week:

Over the past five years we have experienced a dramatic change in the role that manufacturing has played as part of the fabric that ties together our global economies. No longer seen as simply "black boxes" in the supply network that simply consumed materials and produced products "” manufacturing has experienced a renaissance whereby investment has returned with an expectation of continued growth into the future. In today's demand-driven reality, the role of the factory has evolved to necessitate greater flexibility and an ability to adapt to real-time sales information, resulting in better customer satisfaction, efficiency and profits.

Aras, a vendor of product lifecycle management (PLM) software, has made generally available Aras Innovator 10. The newest release offers improved PLM platform scalability and an HTML5 Web browser interface.

As companies go global in their operations, they need new solutions for managing risk that can traverse countries and link in thousands of worldwide suppliers. Cloud is coming to the rescue where internal systems can't. Here are three cloud supply chain niche solutions that are gaining traction, and why.