InfinityQS International Inc., a provider of software for manufacturing intelligence, has opened an office in the U.K., near London.

Despite ongoing economic and business environment challenges, world-class procurement organizations continue to outperform the peer group by a wide margin, up to $6m in cost savings for the typical large company. They deliver services at 19 percent lower cost with greater effectiveness and require 27 percent fewer full-time-equivalents (FTEs) per $1bn in spend. For many, efficiency gains have reached their practical limits. What's next?

Gaining deep visibility into sales channels and a timely understanding of every detail about product shipments is essential to modern businesses. Granular knowledge – about what items were sold, who sold them, who bought them, where they are now, and whether they’re being returned – gives manufacturers an edge in optimizing the final mile of the supply chain. That information is known as channel data, and the tools used to gather and manage that data are known as channel data management systems, or CDM.

The global logistics and shipping industry's top technology priority is improving supply chain visibility capabilities to integrate higher quality data, according to a survey conducted for INTTRA, the multi-carrier e-commerce network for ocean shipping.

Much like the early clamor surrounding "Big Data," it has become next to impossible to avoid the "Internet of Things" (IoT) as the latest cross-industry catchphrase. However, while all the hype might imply that IoT is new, the term has actually been around since 1999, when Kevin Ashton, cofounder of MIT’s Auto-ID Center coined it in his seminal article, "That 'Internet of Things' Thing."