The key supply chain challenge today is the juxtaposition of complex and extended supply networks with increasingly fast and volatile demand networks - and the increasingly ineffective role for inventory as a way to buffer cadence mismatches.

Briggs Healthcare develops and markets products that are designed to improve clinical outcomes and reduce operating costs for more than 50,000 customers in the senior care, home care, acute care, physician and retail markets. "Having the right product at the right place and time and at the lowest cost is very important to us," says Brad Mueller, vice president of supply chain solutions.

It's a curiosity of how the internet works that a shopper using a search engine to find a flat-screen TV probably will not turn up Costco Wholesale, a major television vendor and the country's largest retailer after Walmart.

Executives certainly know what social media is. After all, if Facebook users constituted a country, it would be the world's third-largest, behind China and India. Executives can even claim to know what makes social media so potent: its ability to amplify word-of-mouth effects. Yet the vast majority of executives have no idea how to harness social media's power.

When Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine opened its new 1.6 million-square-foot facility with two 12-story towers this year, the building featured a real-time location system (RTLS) that enables the hospital to monitor the locations of hundreds of nurses, as well as thousands of pumps, wheelchairs and other high-value moving equipment.