The sign in the elevator banks at Coca-Cola Refreshments reads: "There is a person at the end of our supply chain." Well, that's a start.

What will the typical factory look like five years from now?

For most business leaders, it's difficult to make any decision without letting bottom line bias come into play. Globalization, in addition to evolving social, economic and regulatory trends, has elevated corporate competition to a new playing field altogether. For procurement departments in particular, cutting costs, doing more with less, and running agile operations are the new standards for success.

Analyst Insight: Demand planning can be both a complex and demanding exercise to fully conduct. To get past the initial challenges, it is tempting to consolidate demand planning into a few simple metrics and goals to support adoption. Blue Hill believes that this approach will ultimately sabotage the best-intended intentions to support enterprise demand planning. – Hyoun Park, Chief Research Officer at Blue Hill Research

Analyst Insight: The greatest gap between performance and satisfaction of supply chain applications is in the area of demand planning. The reasons are many, but many are rooted in organizational and processes issues causing many people to throw in the towel too early. – Lora Cecere, Founder of Supply Chain Insights

Analyst Insight: Collaboration is widely identified by supply chain analysts as a critical trend for supply chain execution. But it is one thing to "say" collaboration and quite another thing to get it right and garner real results from your efforts. For the best results, think of collaboration and integration together. And don't be afraid to contract for collaboration. - Kate Vitasek is a faculty member of the University of Tennessee's Graduate Center for Executive Education.

Retail demand planning is, to a great extent, a game of numbers. But the store that relies entirely on hard statistics is likely to be in for an unpleasant surprise.

Analyst Insight: Optimization. It sounds simple enough, but when was the last time you thoroughly reviewed your supply chain, and more specifically, the transportation network and associated cost structure for complete optimization? Optimization has many spokes, yet the goal is to improve service and reduce costs. For many companies this awareness is event-driven, occurring only when something negatively impacts the supply chain such as congestion at ports or anywhere along the transportation network, supplier issues, or an imbalance in inventory. – John Haber, President & CEO, Spend Management Experts

Analyst Insight: Companies spent over $400bn on external management consultants in 2013 with a majority on strategy development and implementation. This figure shows companies struggle to develop and retain strategy as a skill in the talent toolbox. As a pioneer of process engineering and continuous improvement, supply chain has already proven to be an organization that can break complex problems down into simple, repeatable steps. It's now our turn to do the same with strategy. – Matt Davis, SVP Research at SCM World