Today's shippers are done talking about collaborative freight solutions and are ready to allocate resources to design and implement programs that can scale, says Ben Cubitt, senior vice president for consulting and engineering of Transplace. He describes the role that 3PLs can play in such projects.

As businesses increasingly become more mobile, integrating different devices, applications and data into a single, seamless network is a significant challenge. In this Power Lunch roundtable, conducted at the annual user conference sponsored by Barcoding Inc., three experts discuss the keys to a successful integration project and identify common mistakes to avoid. They are: Martin Jack, chief technology officer at Barcoding Inc.; Kerry Kulp, network systems consultant at Cumulus Consulting Group; and Kelly Harris, director of program management at Barcoding Inc. The conversation is facilitated by SupplyChainBrain Editor Emeritus Jean Murphy.

A host of marketplace trends are driving logistics companies to offer more value-added services and to physically locate closer to customers in order to support continued growth, says John Ferguson, CEO of SCI Logistics, a major logistics provider in Canada.