May 29, 2008 at 1:00 PM EDT

Globalization and outsourcing have forced shippers to improve their shipment accountability and tame their inbound and outbound transportation costs in regions of the world they may have never even visited.

In the meantime, much is being written about evolving applications and tools geared to better network and harness transportation and logistics data to help shippers manage these extended, distributed supply networks. However, even some of the savviest logistics pros are still in the dark as to what those tools are and how they actually function.

To help better explain these new applications we pulled four top supply chain technology analysts to help explain the myths.

• AMR’s John Fontanella
• ARC’s Adrian Gonzalez
• AberdeenGroup’s Ian Hobkirk and
• Manufacturing Insights’ Simon Ellis

We’ll take at deeper look at SaaS, the evolving role of business intelligence (BI), and try to define exactly what “visibility” is and how it can add benefit to any supply chain operation.