The world is using its natural resources at an ever-increasing rate. Worldwide, annual extraction of primary materials—biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores, and minerals—tripled between 1970 and 2010. People in the richest countries now consume up to 10 times more resources than those in the poorest nations.

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In today's hyper-competitive, fast-paced manufacturing world, there is rarely anything like a "routine" day at the office—especially when you're a tier-one supplier for some of the largest aerospace companies in the world. To make the grade and satisfy this kind of demanding customer base requires smarts, efficiency, hard work, and innovation. A little extra horsepower on the shop floor never hurts, either.

In 2014, the International Automotive Task Force (IATF) reported that the automotive industry wouldn’t upgrade the ISO/TS 16949 standard to ISO 9001:2015, much to the dismay of Tier One suppliers. In a survey that same year, Tier One suppliers related their desire to update their management systems to ISO 9001. Additionally, they weren’t happy with the industry’s onerous customer-specific requirements.

The global food industry has never faced more challenges. From tainted dairy products to contaminated beef, high-profile cases crop up regularly to dent consumer confidence, while leading companies work hard to reclaim lost faith. So how trustworthy is your food?

One of the big themes in the current presidential race is how decades of free trade have dealt a heavy blow to the U.S. worker as millions of jobs were shipped overseas to take advantage of cheap labor.

Driven by market expansion, financial pressures, and the need to accelerate innovation, today’s manufacturers have expanded their global operations and supply partners. This evolution has only amplified the manufacturer and supply-chain relationship, which is often characterized by a delicate balance between cooperation and adversarial negotiation.

In March 2011, Leonardo Bonanni was preparing to defend his Ph.D. thesis about Sourcemap, software that lets consumers map every connection of a product supply chain on a digital map, when tragedy struck in Japan. Although the deadly earthquake and tsunami occurred half a world away, the events had an unexpected affect on Bonanni and Sourcemap.

It’s no surprise that multinational companies have complex global supply chains. What’s less obvious is how to simplify supply-chain processes and arrive at a lean, consistent, reliable, and cost-effective solution. One global leader, ITT Corp., has taken on this challenge with the help of Ultriva, a supply-chain solution by Upland Software, which supplies cloud-based manufacturing and supply-chain collaboration and execution solutions.

Whether it’s for performance management or for risk, it’s important to know who your suppliers are and have a close business relationship with them.