When Bob Trebilcock, Roberto Michel and I started working on this issue, we all thought we had a pretty good idea what is the real-time plant and warehouse. And we did. Kind of.

The deeper we got into it, the more complex and even elusive real time became. You see, there are many different views here.

More than once, people said to us, "I'm not quite sure why you're focusing on this. Most everyone today already works in real time."

But the more we talked, the more apparent it became that the capabilities of and expectations for real time are changing. And rapidly.

It's one thing to pick/pack/convey/sort/ship an order in real time. It's quite something else to use real time to pick/pack/convey/reassign that inventory to another order/sort/ship without missing a beat. And that is exactly where real time is headed.

In some regards, new technologies, not the least of which is the Internet, are driving the new look and feel of real time. So is tighter and more pervasive integration of the physical handling and information handling components of the supply chain.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I went to Manhattan Associate's users conference. One of the keynote speakers was Don Tapscott. His most recent book is "The Naked Corporation—How the Age of Transparency Will Revolutionize Business."

As he explained, corporate transparency goes far beyond Sarbanes-Oxley. It's all about access to information about a corporation. Yes, he too was talking about the real-time plant and warehouse.

Tapscott went on to describe how transparency impacts the supply chain. It speeds up metabolism, improves performance, and drops transaction costs, to name three improvements. On a grand scale, "transparency is the new force in the supply chain," said Tapscott.

As you will see in this issue, real time creates transparency in the supply chain. It changes how and when work is done within the four walls. It also changes how and when companies work with both customers and suppliers. And the pioneers of the next generation of real time are already getting an extremely big bang for their buck.

Or as Tapscott put it, "The train has already left the station on transparency." We hope you're on board.