Rear Admiral Mark Heinrich, commander of the Naval Supply Systems Command and chief of the Supply Corps, reveals what it's like to oversee one of the world's most complex and critical supply chains.

Supply Chain Management is a "tale of two cities", Leader City and Laggard City. Residents of Leader City, according to benchmarks from APQC, outperform their median competitors with an overwhelming cost and performance advantage. As you navigate the journey to Leader City, at some point, you are going to have to obtain management commitment as evidenced by the fact that we've all been to dozens of case study presentations at conferences over the years. What do they all have in common? You have to have management commitment to be successful. What they never tell you is how to get it! Here's one of the secrets to gaining management commitment that Rich Sherman reveals in his new book. Material excerpted from Supply Chain Transformation: Practical Roadmap to Best Practice Results, by Richard Sherman, 2012. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

This is why they call Big Data big: IDC, a research firm, predicts that the Big Data market "” including technology and services "” will grow at a 31.7% compound annual rate through 2016, becoming a $23.7bn market by 2016.

A global research study by Oracle has found that brands could lose as much as 20 percent of their annual revenue due to poor customer service, with 95 percent of executives agreeing that delivering a great customer experience is critical to business results.

President Obama didn't mention the word "retail" a single time in his State of the Union address. But retailers could nonetheless be widely impacted by proposals put forth in the annual speech to Congress, ranging from promises to create jobs and grow the economy to a plan to increase the federal minimum wage that is drawing headlines this morning.

Is it a waste of time to make economic forecasts? Even the most respected prognosticators are wrong as often as they're right. And the most sweeping changes? Hardly anyone ever sees them coming.

For a new report on supply chain excellence, an assistant and I waded through spreadsheet after spreadsheet of data for the last three weeks and contrasted the progress of the high-tech, consumer products, food, pharmaceutical and industrial industries. The storyline of the report is that ONLY the high-tech industry is making progress on what I call the Supply Chain Effective Frontier - effectively balancing progress on growth, profitability, cycles and complexity. The rest of the industries are either stuck or moving backwards. Consumer packaged goods, food and chemical manufacturers are stuck and pharmaceutical and industrial companies are losing ground and moving backwards.