  This paper discusses the broad challenges shared by e-commerce and the
process industries operating global supply chains. Specifically, we discuss how
process industries and e-commerce differ in many aspects but have similar
challenges ahead of them in order to remain competitive, keep up with the
always increasing requirements of the customers and stakeholders, and gain
efficiency. While both industries have been early adopters of decision support
tools based on machine intelligence, both share unresolved challenges related
to scalability, integration of decision-making over different time horizons
(e.g. strategic, tactical and execution-level decisions) and across internal
business units, and orchestration of human and computer-based decision-makers.
We discuss future trends and research opportunities in the area of supply
chain, and suggest that the methods of multi-agent systems supported by
rigorous treatment of human decision-making in combination with machine
intelligence is a great contender to address these critical challenges.
