The Big Data revolution offers organizations the ability to capitalize on the massive amounts of information driving their global supply chains. With Big Data and analytics, companies can gain greater visibility into inventory levels, order fulfillment rate, delivery of materials and products, and other critical information. For instance, real-time RFID and SKU reports from transportation vehicles can allow organizations to more precisely time inbound shipments and improve manufacturing productivity.

And while companies gain better insight into their supply/demand tradeoffs, they can also leverage Big Data in sales and operations planning processes and can analyze unstructured data, such as customer comments on social channels, which may support better forecast modeling. Evaluation of current channel usage by customers can help optimize a company's sales channel strategies. But many companies have yet to leverage Big Data in their supply chain operations.

In this interactive HBR webinar, Lehigh professor Nada Sanders explores the ways leading companies in industrial manufacturing, automotive, and other sectors have developed their Big Data capabilities.

This blog first appeared on Harvard Business Review on 08/06/2013.

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