Looking for a way to make your supply chain more efficient? You might want to consider reusable packaging.

As a Target "beauty concierge," young Chelsea Mathison prowls the cosmetic aisles at the retailer's Nicollet Mall store, sweetly asking shoppers if they need beauty tips and recommendations. The pixieish clerk seems an unlikely front-line warrior in the Minneapolis-based retailer's effort to embrace showrooming -- where consumers fiddle with products in stores, only to surf their smartphones to see if they can buy the items cheaper somewhere else.

ABI Research forecasts that the M2M analytics industry will grow a robust 53.1% over the next 5 years from $1.9bn in 2013 to $14.3bn in 2018. The forecast includes revenue segmentation for the five components that together enable analytics to be used in M2M services: data integration, data storage, core analytics, data presentation, and associated professional services.

Many a company has a "customer first" approach, and improvement methodologies such as Lean and Six Sigma start with the "voice of the customer". So what is the point in trying to solve modern-day business problems with ethnography methods that many people still exclusively associate with anthropology?

Improvement in a number of indexes suggest optimism for the manufacturing sector in the coming three to six months, according to the quarterly MAPI Business Outlook.

The Global Environmental Management Initiative is developing a tool focused on supply chain sustainability and the procurement decision-making process.