In addition to keeping your supply chain in tight communication with itself and able to react at a quick notice, your managers will need to have a concrete understanding of how different parties interact.

Manufacturing supply software can accomplish this, as it's an obvious need being felt within the industry and looked at in different ways. One surprisingly physical method is detailed in the MIT Technology review in the training program from MBA students at the college.

Called "the beer game" (though not in the way you might think) this is meant to demonstrate the management and resource coordination that goes into running a complicated system and what it takes to keep things solvent. Writer Peter Dizikes writes about how in his own experience he saw the team he worked with accumulate too high a volume of inventory in too little a time.

Using simple tabletop markers, this game attempts to represent the problems that managers run into over a series of weeks within the industry. The game involves hundreds of students and despite the seemingly simple setup, challenges the players to keep costs low in an effort to maximize profit. 

While it doesn't involve graduate competition, Google also has recently released its own approach to allowing businesses to integrate important business data into its map function to see the details of their practices rendered visually. 

It's likely that with the growth and proliferation of these systems, the role of inventory management systems will become even greater and be a more vital part of the planning that goes into these operations.