Challenge: Specializing in optical products, a global manufacturer of glasses across approximately 16 production plants in Asia and a dozen distribution centers in Europe and America faced the need to ensure effective management of its supply chain.

Challenge: Family-owned supplier of operating supplies/equipment for global hospitality set out for new WMS system. Requirements: • Automated dispatching to eliminate inaccuracies/inefficiencies associated with manual intervention; • Open integration with voice-picking, ensuring extensibility across warehouse floor; • Real-time reporting/alerting on order fulfillment, improved replenishment process for better use of resources; • Warehouse task-interleaving, eliminating wasted travel time on lifts and vehicles; • Streamlined receiving process, allowing product allocation at line receipt versus at completion.

A lean operation with a brilliant idea - caffeinated club soda - wants to crack the L.A. market during the spring. Sounds like a slam dunk, but they don't want to commit to a long warehouse lease while they're still getting a foothold. Meanwhile, a Christmas-decoration warehouse sits largely empty. It's a classic missed connection - and it’s common.

Firms that employ low-risk innovative initiatives produce valuable returns, while the most adept companies with a more aggressive innovation profile grow more quickly, says a survey by the National Center for the Middle Market (NCMM) and CPA firm Cherry Bekaert LLP.

For about a decade now, policy makers and the soda industry have been fighting about the idea of a big soda tax. Proponents say it would fight obesity by reducing consumption of sugary drinks. A leading objection by the industry is that the tax simply would not work.

Challenge: An online fashion retailer's model for distributing product from Europe to end customers in the U.S. created high shipping costs that made it impossible to ship returns back to Europe. The retailer was forced to sell returned merchandise to discounters for a fraction of its value.

The National Retail Federation expects sales in November and December (excluding autos, gas and restaurant sales) to increase a solid 3.7 percent to $630.5bn - significantly higher than the 10-year average of 2.5 percent. Holiday sales in 2015 are expected to represent approximately 19 percent of the retail industry’s annual sales of $3.2 tr. Additionally, NRF is forecasting online sales to increase between 6 and 8 percent to as much as $105bn.

A growing number of consumers go to Amazon first when shopping for online products. According to a Survata study, commissioned by BloomReach, 44 percent of shoppers go straight to Amazon, beating out the 34 percent who go direct to search engines and 21 percent who go directly to a retailer's e-commerce site.