Gladson has joined with 1Worldsync to market an integrated application to brand owners for product-content management.

Rick Davis, vice president of business planning with Kellogg USA, makes the case for applying sophisticated demand-sensing capabilities to the planning and forecasting process.

Schneider National Inc., a provider of truckload, intermodal and logistics services, is opening a facility in Phoenix, Ariz.

Challenge: A U.S.-based global solar photovoltaic manufacturer was aggressively expanding into new markets such Australia and the Middle East with high solar incidence. However, the company lacked resources to design to local standards and meet sourcing cost pressures from increasing competition. Limited knowledge of the new geographies restricted the company's ability to quickly enter new markets with competitively priced products.

Companies are increasingly connecting the dots between risk management and sustainability by making sustainability issues more prominent on corporate agendas, says a study by Ernst & Young LLP and GreenBiz. Driven by trends such as extreme weather events and risks to natural resources, among other factors, the shift is evidenced by the increasing involvement in sustainability-related issues of shareholders and the C-suite. At the same time, the study finds, companies are not adequately aligning risk response to the scale of sustainability challenges.

It's more than just number-crunching. Lalit Wadwha, vice president of global supply chain operations with Avnet Electronics Marketing, lays out the fundamentals of supply-chain analytics.

Korean electronics and home appliance firm Dongbu Daewoo Electronics is selling a near field communication-enabled refrigerator in Korea that allows users to track the condition and efficiency of their kitchen appliance, by means of an NFC smartphone loaded with a Dongbu Daewoo application.

The installed base of Bluetooth-enabled devices alone reached 3.5 billion in 2012 and is forecast to grow to almost 10 billion by 2018"”with not even taking into account many other technologies, such as Wi-Fi, ZigBee and cellular, according to ABI Research.