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.

While the buzz around mobile transactions is currently high, it shouldn't be considered as a check-box exercise when evaluating solutions. Mobility for the sake of mobility doesn't make financial or operational sense. To really deliver value, mobile transactions should be a tangible, measurable part of an overall improvement strategy for your supply chain operations.

Customer service and fulfillment excellence are highly prioritized strategies for competitive performance. Increasingly, organizations find that for more effective, resilient and reliable supply chain execution in the areas of warehousing, shipping and procurement, more gains are realized by integrating these previously unconnected processes.

Across industries, manufacturers pride themselves on quality but put top emphasis on reducing overall costs. And while these may seem like conflicting priorities, they can be explained by the concurrent demands of the internal economic drivers of an organization and the external customer requirements for quality and efficiency. As such, these priorities are here to stay, especially as the consumer becomes increasingly empowered and publicly vocal. In recent years, product quality and safety have become tightly integrated with traceability and supplier scorecards. But for manufacturers with foresight to proactively implement a comprehensive traceability system before a contamination problem occurs, there is an opportunity to provide their organizations with the ability to dramatically improve response time, implement corrective measures, and minimize repercussions to the bottom line and the brand, should a problem arise.