With all the attention recently being paid to same-day deliveries by retailers including eBay, Walmart, Macy's, Nordstrom and tons of others, here's an interesting stat"”and a delicious contradiction"”from Amazon, the largest and earliest same-day retail deliverer: consumers consider the service, purchase an item, then don't opt to use same-day service.

Manufacturing picked up in December, reflecting growth in orders, employment and exports that indicate the U.S. expansion will be sustained in 2013 following the budget deal.

A few weeks back I referenced the work of Robert J. Gordon, an economist and professor at Northwestern University. In a paper published last September for the Centre for Economic Research, he laid out the history of the first three industrial revolutions. And he asked whether a fourth, supposedly driven by the internet and other advances in information technology, could come anywhere near its predecessors in terms of productivity improvements.

Forecasting Best Practices for Varying Supply Chain Scenarios

In 1948 a supermarket executive came to the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia with a request. He wanted a technology that could encode information about his products. Two graduate students, Bernard Silver and N. Joseph Woodland, took up the challenge. Woodland became obsessed and dropped out of school to concentrate on it.

While more than 75 percent of suppliers are confident in their ability to meet their customers' needs in 2013, one-third of respondents to ASQ's 2013 Manufacturing Outlook Survey say they anticipate a problem with a supplier next year, resulting in a shortage of parts or services.