Andrew Roszko, senior vice president of sales at Descartes, explains how three interrelated trends - big data, direct-to-store shipping and omnichannels - are transforming retail.

Ray Barger, research director with Gartner, describes the firm's five-stage "maturity model" for supply-chain management and procurement. He also grades companies' progress toward ultimate maturity.

With RFID, return on investment derives from automated, accurate, real-time inventory tracking, says McLeod Williamson, RFID business development manager at Zebra Technologies. He provides an update on RFID applications in retail supply chains and describes how other industries are starting to leverage the technology.

In a survey of supply chain executives across industries, Motorola Solutions found that more than a third are planning to either expand existing warehouses or add new warehouses to their networks. Mark Wheeler, director of industry solutions, discusses technological and consumer issues driving this and other trends.

Use of RFID tags at the item level is upstaging case and pallet tagging among many retailers, says Tom O'Boyle, director of RFID at Barcoding Inc. O'Boyle explains the benefits derived from item-level tagging and looks at other innovative applications for RFID, including hybrid systems that mix active and passive tags.

The cloud is more than an alternative means of delivering software, according to Eyal Rosenberg, chief executive officer of Nipendo. It's key to improving collaboration between buyers and suppliers.