Retailers are already planning for the busy holiday shopping season, and there could be a complication this year. As the unemployment rate drops, stores are having a hard time finding workers for their warehouses. They've ordered all kinds of new stuff for the holidays, but it's stuck in a bottleneck.

As the push for higher minimum pay builds momentum on both sides of the Atlantic, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain this week threatened companies with tough fines if they fail to pay what he called a "national living wage."

Change in the organization is inevitable. So how do you get your employees to stop blocking it?

Seventy-eight percent of chief financial officers say the legislation over the Affordable Care Act has not affected their hiring patterns, according to a survey by Consero Group, which reported results as part of the 2015 Corporate Finance Data Survey.

Manufacturing is expected to yield approximately 700,000 new jobs in 2015, according to a report from APICS Supply Chain Council, which urges the industry to recruit women for those positions.

At 29 years of age, Katy Conrad, site lead at Shell's Geismar Chemical Plant, is a terrific ambassador for her profession. She loves everything about supply management - working with smart engineering and business professionals, solving tough problems, and making a bottom-line impact. At Shell, she has delivered significant savings, built a regional B2B sourcing strategy, and held an overseas assignment.

For most of the past three decades, private equity firms and other investors have relied on two simple questions to assess the supply chains of the companies in which they've invested: Are our companies leveraging low-cost country supply sources and are they keeping supply chain costs in check? Deeper inquiries have always seemed unnecessary, so private equity firms and investors have focused on other aspects of the businesses they own to drive value.

Diebold CEO Andy Mattes can't just stroll down the hall at his company's headquarters in Canton, Ohio, to confer with his top executives over coffee. That's because many don't work there. His chief strategist works and lives 2,100 miles away in San Jose; his chief marketing officer is in Boston.