Increased linkage between material and financial flows requires supply chain managers to learn more about topics like working capital optimization, margin and asset utilization, valuation and risk, managerial accounting and cash flows, taxes and transfer prices.

Retailers are making a fundamental shift in the way they do business by creating value networks that coordinate processes and technology to understand, shape and respond more efficiently to consumer demand. Leading supply chain organizations recognize the link between responsive networks and improved supply chain performance.

Working capital optimization has always been the least expensive and most readily available form of cash. With tightening credit markets the option of liberating cash from a company's operational processes has moved to the forefront. Inventory optimization presents the second-largest opportunity among the working capital components after trade receivables and ahead of trade payables.

Only 31 percent of organizations are looking at inventory management as a competitive differentiator versus the rest looking at it as a cost impactor. By adjusting the existing processes to configure a closed-loop inventory management process, organizations can gain significant improvement in customer service levels and reduced inventory carrying costs. The concept of closed-loop inventory management involves seven steps within the process: analyze demand, segment inventory, optimize inventory, replenish inventory, track inventory, manage events, and responsively execute.

For those who maintain that companies have no business getting involved with responsibility-driven endeavors because, after all, "the business of business is business" there is often a lack of awareness of the business benefits-and practical imperatives-associated with responsibility-driven endeavors. Likewise, critics who point out that it is only for shameless cost or reputation-related motives that companies adopt responsibility-driven platforms often fail to acknowledge the many positive social and environmental outcomes even of initiatives with top or bottom line-driven goals. Case study interviews with firms of all sizes indicate that these critiques illuminate an outmoded way of understanding the social, economic, and environmental imperatives of this historic moment.