Customer relationship management technology has evolved to support increasingly complex business needs. How do you find one that's right for you?

Mobility is a hot topic these days. Regardless of industry or profession, a mobile application or ecosystem is in development to serve it. The supply chain is no different. In fact, given its very manual and distributed nature, the supply chain is better suited to mobile application deployment than most business processes. For distribution and fulfillment services, where most of the activities take place away from the desktop, the extension of business processes to mobile applications just makes sense. Most CEOs today are looking to the supply chain for competitive advantage (think Amazon's drones), so the time is right for supply chain managers to begin the process of introducing mobile into their processes.

Of all the issues the Obama administration is grappling with, a modest redesign of what food labels say about sweeteners might not have seemed among the more controversial. But ever since First Lady Michelle Obama unveiled the plan last year, a lobbying frenzy has ensued.

Analyst Insight: In 2010, as we began to offer a supply chain risk management class at Lehigh, our body of knowledge continued to expand and migrated into a very effective methodology to review, evaluate and benchmark a company's end-to-end supply chain maturity and inherent risk. The methodology encompassed 100 questions-of-discovery across 10 tenets of the supply chain resulting in a Red, Yellow & Green "spider diagram" profile of a company's supply chain maturity and inherent risk. – Gregory L. Schlegel, Founder, The Supply Chain Risk Management Consortium, and Adjunct Professor, Supply Chain Risk Management, Lehigh University

Analyst Insight: From humble beginnings at the machine control layer, warehouse systems have matured and expanded to allow visibility and control over what is happening at the machine, parcel, associate and order/wave level. When combined with data from wearables and other Internet of Things technologies, warehouse control software will drive new opportunities for distribution efficiency. – Nikko Pianetto, Group Vice President, Integrated Technology Solutions, Fortna Inc.

Analyst Insight: Delivering a seamless customer experience will demand a more comprehensive approach to inventory visibility across the entire supply chain. Gone are the days of "offline and online" inventories. Retailers must determine how they will create and leverage one view of all of their inventories, where any location now may become a source to fulfill a customer's order. – Melanie Nuce, Vice President of Apparel and General Merchandise, GS1 US

Analyst Insight: Service providers, couriers and retailers have been doing last mile for decades. But times are different now. Consider: omnichannel, Amazon's game-changing free and same-day delivery, and Sears creating an offering service for third parties. The last two years also saw disrupters who were previously unknown enter the logistics market. But traditional transportation technology firms are fighting back. 2015 will show dramatic changes in the market. – Ann Grackin, CEO ChainLink Research