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Mark Millar, Managing Director, M Power Associates, Hong Kong. In these turbulent times, companies are increasingly looking to their logistics and supply chain functions / partners for more innovative solutions, providing improved efficiencies, reduced costs and optimized supply chains. Use these times to reinforce the contribution and importance of supply chain and logistics disciplines across all industries, thereby boosting the reputation and credibility of the profession.

Patricia J. Moser-Stern, President, i3 advantage inc. Position Procurement and Supply Chain within your corporation so that these groups are considered a core-critical component to the success of the business.

Adeel Najmi, Solution Executive and Fellow, i2 Technologies, Inc. Apply Six Sigma methods to improve performance through continuously understanding and quantifying risks and tailoring supply chain policies by portfolio segment.

Kevin North, President and CEO, Dyadem International. Last year offered a warning to software vendors: Make yourself meaningful in measurable, immediate and practical ways or face significant financial losses and stalled revenue growth.

Miguel Mota, Senior Manager, Plan4Demand Solutions Inc. Develop "what-if" scenarios to promptly identify risks and opportunities in the supply chain. Technology provides the capability of creating these scenarios with real data using advanced algorithms and optimizers to enhance decision making. Define the most critical scenarios and create concrete action plans for each of them with metrics attached that allow for the monitoring of operational impact.

Louise O'Sullivan, President and CEO, Prime Advantage Corporation. Look to group purchasing organizations that can help you leverage group purchasing power and a broad breadth of supplier categories.

Brian Owens, Senior Vice President of Industry Solutions, IQNavigator. Reductions in spending during difficult times can be a doubled-edged sword. Exercise extreme caution to ensure that the reductions are not disruptive to the organization and do not pose the risk of eliminating revenue-generating opportunities. The key is to initiate the right strategy to make reductions in the right places and at the right times.

Elliot Owens, Director, Business Intelligence, ProcureStaff, Ltd. Don't just benchmark your spend against your own performance year-over-year, benchmark yourself against other companies in and out of your industry vertical. Owens architected a sophisticated business intelligence service that lets users of ProcureStaff's services procurement offering compare their performance in this thorny category against a cleansed and standardized set of data reflecting all of ProcureStaff's programs from the first human capital data warehouse. This approach can drive significant cost savings beyond the automation of human capital procurement, the most costly commodity used in any business.

Kirit Pandit, Vice President of Product Management for Spend Analysis and Compliance, Emptoris, Inc. Through his book Spend Analysis: The Window into Strategic Sourcing, public speaking engagements, and through consultation and engagements with Global 2000 companies, Pandit works to promote spend visibility and spend control as a way for companies to weather the economic downturn.

Dr. Christoph Plapp, CEO, Axxom Software AG. Take a look into smart supply chain reorganization. Dr. Plapp's customers have achieved savings up to 30 percent in various projects they have undertaken.

Kevin Potts, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management, Emptoris, Inc. "Technology and innovation can go a long way in helping companies to not only get lean and efficient, but also in delivering sustained business performance improvements," says Potts.

Margaret Price, Chairwoman and Chief Sustainability Officer, Green Supply Chain.org. As sustainability becomes an increasingly important in the supply chain, consider attaining a certification like the Certified Green Supply Chain professional to ensure that you are ahead of the curve in adopting sustainable supply chain practices that help meet business and corporate social responsibility goals.

Dalip Raheja, President & CEO, The Mpower Group, Inc. Encourage the adoption of an end-to-end systems mindset across supply chain functions to develop a collaborative platform where many different internal organizations acknowledge the critical role that each plays and enabling cross functional initiatives that fundamentally change the way you do business.

Sergio Retamal, President, Global4PL. Look to industry organizations like that Global Supply Chain Leaders Group (www.gsclg.com), which serves the senior leaders of supply chain management in business, government and industry on a worldwide basis, responding to the unique needs of leaders who are increasingly responsible for the profitable growth and health of their respective organizations.

Pieter Riedstra, Vice President, A.T. Kearney Procurement & Analytic Solutions. Use your supply chain data tactically with advanced analytics to better understand current processes and even reveal key factors that might affect new and future initiatives within the supply chain.

Robert A. Rudzki, President, Greybeard Advisors LLC. Find the optimum balance between pursuing quick wins and the long-term value of staying focused on strategic initiatives.

Matt Ryan, CEO, Riverwood Solutions. Leverage solutions and services like Riverwood’s Hybrid Outsourced Services Team model that allow you to communicate with, measure, manage, and ‘course correct’ with suppliers on a near real-time basis, including critical small and midsize suppliers.

Ashok Santhanam, CEO, Bristlecone. Cost-cutting is imperative in this economic climate, and Santhanam offers three principals to guide how you go about the process: maximize the efficiency of your supply chain, increase the velocity of information flow and ensure flexibility in your supply chain.

Bob Segert, President and CEO, GXS. Supply chain visibility is crucial in the current economic environment, and Segert has focused his efforts on expanding the B2B outsourcing services GXS offers, which have saved customers millions.

Raj Sharma, President & CEO, Censeo Consulting Group. In challenging economic times, Sharma argues that organizations cannot afford not to pursue demand management as a core supply management strategy. Sharma worked with one large defense agency to uncover capacity in excess of 70 percent of requirements.

Binayak Shrestha, Senior Director of Consulting, Global eProcure. Shift from identified to realized savings. Typical savings realized where on-going monitoring is absent is 40-50 percent. With change management, compliance, and savings tracking and reporting tools in place, 90-95 percent of identified savings can be achieved.

David Simchi-Levi, Chief Scientist, ILOG. New tactics and strategies, including manufacturing and supply chain flexibility, must be applied by companies to stay at the top of the new competitive environment.

Amar Singh, President and CEO, Amitive. Take a look at Community-SCM, which takes a risk-management approach to the supply chain, creating real-time visibility and collaboration across the entire trading community and leading to lowered costs, improved product velocity and reduced risk for all stakeholders.

Bob Solomon, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Ariba Supplier Network, Ariba, Inc. Provide access to capital for your suppliers through third-party supply chain financing options or receivables auctioning in order to promote overall supply chain health.

Charles Smart, President & CEO, Smart Software, Inc. Make changes to the way you create your forecasts to achieve better short-term results. Prioritize service levels for your products. To optimize inventory and maximize sales, service levels should be set high (90-99%) for highly demanded items, but can probably be set much lower (70-80%) for other items. By doing this type of analysis, many find that they need much less stock for many of their SKUs than they previously thought. Furthermore, to improve accuracy, shorten the demand history used to generate a forecast so that more emphasis is placed on recent trends and demand patterns rather than history from two or three years ago.

Stan Smith, CEO and President, CIMTEK. Manufacturers should find a balance between quality and cost.

Ara Surenian, President and Founder, Cadent Resources, Inc. Combine lean techniques with probabilistic demand technology to drive speed and visibility to better respond to impending changes in demand.

Pradeep Tapadiya, President and CEO, Software Labs. The supply chain is about moving goods, but keeping the supply chain moving means moving data efficiently. Leverage technologies that ensure your data move with accuracy and quality.

Dawn Tiura Evans, CEO and President, Sourcing Interests Group. In challenging economic times, the most important asset of supply management professionals is the ability to take a leadership role to drive bottom-line impact. Now is the time to "return to basics," execute professionally, capitalize on the new tools available to automate parts of the process, and execute on current market intelligence versus past "knowns."

Jason Treida, Chief Operating Officer and Founder, Iasta. In today's economy it's even more important to implement savings results quicker. Treida says advanced sourcing optimization technology is a critical function of increasing the speed of award analysis for implementation.

Mark Usher, Co-Founder and President, Treya Partners. Do you work for a small firm that can't afford big-time consulting fees and yet need to access the talent and delivery capability of a big consulting firm. Leverage the offerings of boutique consulting firms targeted at your market space.

Tim Vaio, Managing Vice President, Hitachi Consulting. Become responsive to all kinds of changes. Printing company client: By becoming more responsive in its transportation process, the company saved $2 million in the first year alone.

Rajesh Voddiraju, Co-CEO, CVM Solutions. Use your supply chain to help trim and even eliminate wasteful spending.

Terry Wellesley, Managing Director, BMO Spend & Payment Solutions. Better connect your physical and financial supply chains, such as incorporating spend and supplier management solutions with financial services, to gain control over corporate spending.

Mark Wheeler, Principal of Supply Chain Solutions, Motorola. Use the slow time to leverage the "relatively" fixed costs of internal engineering and IT staff to make the operational and technology changes that there wasn't time to address when your company focus was more on managing growth.

John Williford, President, Supply Chain Solutions, Ryder. Consider implementing exhaustive total landed cost and network design studies in the face of tough decisions about how much and what sourcing to shift, where to locate, and whether warehousing should remain overseas or be brought closer to home.