Looking back at 2005, it's been an amazing year for our company and for our customers. We've been showered with industry accolades such as Supply and Demand Chain Executive's Supply Chain Top 100 providers, Aberdeen Group naming our client Redback Networks and D.W. Morgan the winners of Best Practices in International Logistics and we were honored at Cisco Systems' Supplier of the Year awards for the second time in three years.

There's a good reason for this success. We help our customers succeed. Supply chain management and visibility into the movement and supply of goods is where businesses are going to succeed or fail in the next decade.

Take a look at the industry statistics. A recent IndustryWeek magazine survey of manufacturing executives found the 91 percent of them ranked supply chain management as either "very important" or "critical" to the success of their business.

Yet, the same IndustryWeek magazine survey found that a mere two percent of executives ranked their supply chain as "excellent." Even worse, when asked what steps they were taking to improve their supply chains, nearly 60 percent of the respondents said they had no strategy at all.

The importance of logistics and supply chain is beginning to grow among the top ranks of corporations. In a recent poll, over 70 percent of CEOs surveyed by UPS-Harris Interactive called supply chain management "very" or "extremely" important. As further evidence of the increasing importance firms are attaching to logistics and supply chain optimization is seen in the news everyday. For example, Motorola lured Stuart Reed from his position as IBM vice president of manufacturing to become senior vice president of global supply chain, reporting directly to CEO Ed Zander.

The manufacturing world has reached a critical mass. Complex, global, and getting more so everyday. What's needed is not more complexity, but a move to simplicity. We call that "Supply on Demand." This strategy uses the latest technologies to provide simple tools to access information sitting in complex systems and managers who use them will have an enormous advantage over their competitors.

In our work with clients in real-world situations, we've seen them make enormous gains by embracing new technologies that create networked supply chains—with real-time communication and simple tools for instant visibility and control. Our commitment is to provide our clients with these tools together with LEAN strategies which allow them to take control of their global production processes and create a truly demand-responsive environment and be the winners in the next decade.