Congress has moved one step closer to closing a decades-old loophole that has given online retailers an artificial competitive advantage over their brick and mortar competitors with hearings on the Marketplace Equity Act (HR 3179).
At the end of this month, 211 million Ikea catalogs will be sent off into the world. If one lands on your doorstep, you'll want to have your smartphone handy.
Supply chains are just as susceptible to faddish behavior as anything else. We're social animals, so we tend to follow the crowd - especially if we believe that the crowd has a competitive edge. That's why so many companies flocked to China over the last couple of decades, in search of ever-cheaper sources of production. Or why outsourcing became such a hot trend over that same period of time.
Syspro, a vendor of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for small and mid-sized manufactures and distributors, has announced several new products. The company will soon be debuting an App Store which will extend the availability of its ERP offering within its partner and user community.
Import cargo volume at the nation's major retail container ports is expected to increase 1.6 percent in July compared with the same month last year, and modest year-over-year increases are expected through the holiday season shipping cycle, according to the monthly Global Port Tracker report released today by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates.
Cities have long been the world's economic dynamos, but today the speed and scale of their expansion are unprecedented. Through a combination of consumption and investment in physical capital, growing cities could inject up to $30tr a year into the world economy by 2025. Understanding cities and their shifting demographics is critical to reaching urban consumers and to preparing for the challenges that will arise from increasing demand for natural resources (such as water and energy) and for capital to invest in new housing, office buildings, and port capacity.
Blue Ridge Inventory Group, LLC, a provider of optimization and analytics applications in the cloud, has introduced an integrated analytics tool, designed to help supply chains capitalize on data trapped in their software.
JustEnough Software, a vendor of demand-management applications for retailers, distributors and brand owners, has formed an alliance with the supply chain consultancy enVista.
We like the term "supply chain" because it suggests a tightly interlinked series of steps that results in the uninterrupted flow of product from the raw-materials stage all the way to the consumer. But the word "chain" also evokes a burden, and that's how many companies have come to view their operations in recent years. Hence the mania for outsourcing everything from design and manufacturing to logistics.
Hibbett Sports Inc. plans to move its distribution center from Birmingham to Alabaster, spending more than $25m on the project at a site near the Shelby County Airport.
