Time-critical decisions in transportation, risk management, security, disaster response, manufacturing, and other operational domains require continuous real-time situational awareness and intelligence. Most enterprise systems do not provide this today.

New implementation guidelines for leveraging GS1 standards in apparel and general merchandise ecommerce have been released by GS1 US. The Voluntary Guidelines for Exchanging Extended Attributes for eCommerce were developed in collaboration with more than 15 retailers, vendors and solution providers participating in the GS1 US Apparel and General Merchandise Initiative and are available at www.gs1us.org/eCommerceExtendedAttributes.

Looking at safety statistics, it's easy to conclude that the loading dock is one of the most hazardous areas of your operations. A quarter of all accidents occur there. The majority of these accidents result in the dreaded back injury that, according to OHSA, ultimately ends up costing U.S. companies upwards of $80bn dollars annually.

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?