Change still is a constant and it comes at today's supply chain professionals faster, with more intensity and greater risks than ever before. Art Van Bodegraven describes what this means for current and future supply chain leaders.

Humankind is forever striving for perfection. When it comes to the job of demand forecasting, however, perhaps we ought to be a tad less obsessive.

Many companies unintentionally have created departmental silos within their organizations. Information and products go back and forth between the different functional areas, but the customer is often missing from the process. When lean supply chain strategies, which focus on eliminating waste, are implemented, once again the customer is often times left out. Instead of focusing on the client, the company focuses internally to improve processes. Research shows that undertaking a lean supply chain journey that extends outside the four walls of the organization significantly improves the customer experience, company productivity and the bottom line. - Eric Lail, VP, Continuous Improvement and Client Services, Transportation Insight

With warehousing and logistics operations in numerous countries, Greg McKinley of InComm shares his experience and advice on how to select a reliable in-country vendor.

Analyst Insight: Combining supply chain analysis and consulting topics is more logical than you think. Best practice/market leading companies regularly use outside consultants. When you look at the roll of consultants' clients, it includes all the leading companies. Leaders know that to innovate, they have to 'break the rules" - extending beyond status quo. They know that analyzing and improving supply chain process performance requires full-time commitment and expertise - to look at processes from the outside in.

Some random themes and thoughts to emerge from Oracle Corp.'s Value Chain Summit in San Jose, Calif. last week:

Big data is the all the rage and getting tons of press as it has allowed manufacturers and supply chain executives to create new and compelling data-driven strategies that help them compete, innovate and capture wallet-share. Perhaps fueled in part by the likes of leading database vendors or system integrators (SIs) looking to cash in on high-dollar predictive analytic and scoring engagements, big data represents many things to many people, but one of the most pragmatic applications is mastering all the data elements used in a business infrastructure. The term commonly used for this process is master data management, or MDM.

And you thought that sponsorships for the Olympics were all about consumer products and services. Meet the Official Carbon Partner of the Sochi Games.