Reports from the Contact Center/Marketing Effectiveness, Manufacturing, Product Innovation + Engineering, and Supply Chain Management research practices of Aberdeen are now available.

As retail supply chains grow increasingly larger geographical footprints, they become more susceptible to risk. Retailers have long prepared for natural disasters and geopolitical events, but ongoing financial crises and uncertainty has them even more concerned.

Why is it that the same retailers who will replace a finance clerk's desktop like clockwork every four years will let their POS linger for eight, nine, 10 or more years? Why is it that data centers can be consolidated and servers can be virtualized but e-commerce still operates as a separate channel? The answer is simple: politics.

Chris Schrage, instructor of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa, describes a unique global trade-practices project that involved students from the U.S. and Brazil, and artisans from Latin America.

Job seekers should see varying degrees of positive hiring activity across 31 of 42 countries and territories, with employers in 22 labor markets reporting improved or relatively stable hiring intentions compared to the third quarter. However, according to ManpowerGroup's fourth-quarter 2012 Manpower Employment Outlook Survey, the pace of hiring is expected to weaken in 26 markets compared to one year ago.

While online marketplaces offer additional revenue opportunities for retailers and merchants, there are many areas to improve upon before retailers can fully realize the benefits of them, according to a study from Merchantry, an e-commerce technology provider.

So you're thinking of launching an e-commerce store, whether it's to turn a hobby into an additional income, to take your "bricks and mortar" business online, or perhaps you're ready to launch a new full-time venture in cyber space.

Prime Advantage, a buying consortium for mid-sized manufacturers, announced the findings of its 10th semi-annual Group Outlook Survey, revealing financial projections and top concerns of its member companies for the second half of 2012. The majority of surveyed manufacturers report healthy revenue projections, strong hiring and capital spending plans. However, for a small portion of respondents these plans may see delays due to uncertainty about the results of the federal elections.

Ever since Frederick Taylor's early writing on industrial efficiency - followed by the work of Peter Drucker, Alfred Chandler, and others - the modern Western corporation has been managed according to a tightly defined set of rules and norms. A clear corporate strategy calls for earning at least the cost of capital, growing at a higher rate than the overall market, and managing the portfolio to a "logic" - periodically pruning poorly performing businesses. And with Wall Street analysts ready to applaud CEOs for making their numbers or pulverize them for a one-cent per share miss, there is often little opportunity to change course.