Analyst Insight: With online retail sales projected to reach 17 percent of total company sales in 2010 and double-digit growth expected each year through 2012, retailers must take measures to offer next-generation retail. That would create a model that focuses on consumers and their experiences up to and through the purchase, or moment of truth. While most retailers have invested in some form of online capabilities, few (7 percent) have built the appropriate supply chain infrastructure to support a true, seamless, cross-channel experience for the customer.

Analyst Insight: Ideally, the output of the S&OP plan should drive companies' income statement and balance sheets. Companies should create internal projects and SWAT teams wherein the S&OP plan is mapped to the key financial documents with collaboration between finance and supply chain.

Analyst Insight: There has been significant debate spanning 20 years about the validity of the "perfect order" metric, which measures the quality of product delivery. The debate mostly focuses on how the metric is calculated and if it is a valid measurement of supply chain performance. But, a more relevant part of the discussion is the mentality that drives organizations toward perfect performance.

Analyst Insight: Leading companies have a portfolio of true end-to-end supply chain metrics, use those metrics in key processes such as S&OP, supplement the metrics with customer and supplier dashboards, and have an open attitude and metrics culture that drives them through an upward spiral of increasingly higher levels of performance. Most importantly: they understand they cannot be good at everything, and they consciously manage tradeoffs.

Analyst Insight: Today's supply chain managers operate in a distributed, networked environment, where multi-tier process visibility and effective partner collaboration are critical to success. In order to successfully balance the risks and rewards of this new environment, companies need to have much more transparent and responsive supply chains than in the past.

Analyst Insight: Before investing in new programs for procurement or other functional areas, organizations must evaluate each program thoroughly as implementation can be a time-consuming and expensive process. However, in many cases the long-term benefits may compensate for the short-term pain.