In an effort to drive better efficiency and improve the utilization of the labor force, the most valuable asset in any warehouse, today's Best-in-Class are investing in and creating seamless integration with automation and material handling equipment.

Today's economic uncertainty has brought transportation and distribution operations back to the board room. The fluidity of the supply chain is critical to the long-term success of the organization and should be on everyone's mind.

Expect shipper-carrier relations in 2009 to take a more shipper-centric shape with the shippers dictating the terms. While this is probably not the best long-term strategy, short-term cost pressures will drive many shippers to behave as if this is 1999 and not 2009.

The focus on collaboration and visibility across internal and external departments has clearly provided the Best-in-Class transportation companies with the flexibility and agility necessary to overcome the rising costs in fuel and other shipping costs.

Extreme commodity price volatility has become the norm. To cope, successful sourcing professionals must deeply understand the commodity markets. This means knowing the current and expected industry capacity for delivering that commodity, current and emerging sources of demand, and trading speculation trends.

The global credit crunch is jeopardizing the financial health of our supply chains. In 2009, companies should reassess suppliers' financial stability and implement processes to spot operational red flags that are early warning signals of financial stress.

If ever there was a year for financial and revenue management to come to the fore, then 2009 is that year. It's a year which will witness a vacillating, near schizophrenic, model of cost containment and revenue growth, driven by tentativeness, innovation and acquisition.

When the competition is no longer among individual companies but among entire supply chains, every area of end-to-end cost reduction needs to be explored. Financial supply chain optimization has helped leading companies make their whole supply chain more competitive with the introduction of more advanced supply chain finance practices and automated transaction processing. Finance, supply chain, and procurement groups need to collaboratively explore how to use supply chain finance to reduce supply chain costs.

Increased linkage between material and financial flows requires supply chain managers to learn more about topics like working capital optimization, margin and asset utilization, valuation and risk, managerial accounting and cash flows, taxes and transfer prices.

The S&OP process should be complemented by a strong root cause analysis and execution framework that ensures that the S&OP plan is continuously tracked with respect to the financial goals set forth by the company. In other words, the S&OP lifecycle should precede the financial reporting lifecycle of a company and should be in lock-step.