DHL Global Forwarding has opened Life Sciences and Healthcare Competence Centers in Miami, Fla. and Atlanta, Ga.

Most companies today are heavily outsourced and have suppliers spread out across the globe. Yet firms' knowledge of their suppliers and the environments they operate in is often limited and out-of-date, crippling their ability to successfully manage the dynamics of their supply base. This has introduced substantially more risk in global businesses.

Cass Information Systems, a provider of transportation, utility, telecom and waste invoice payment and information services, has launched Cass Freight Claims Services, an offering that allows shippers to effectively outsource the labor-intensive process of managing freight loss and damage claims and, in some cases, increase claims recoveries by decreasing threshold levels.

Intelleflex Inc. has entered into a partnership with DeltaTRAK Inc. to enhance cold-chain technology for the food, pharmaceutical and processing industries.

The cloud is a viable model for a WMS, says Chuck Fuerst, director of product strategy at HighJump Software. Other things to consider are performance-based applications, labor management solutions, voice technology - and underestimating the cost of a WMS upgrade.

Discrete manufacturing companies operating with highly complex supply chains in today's volatile business world need collaborative planning and the ability to quickly respond to variances in those plans. They often want to model 'what-if' scenarios to better prepare them for those inevitable hiccups - or new business. Kinaxis designed its RapidResponse solution to help companies with demand and supply balancing, optimized forecasting, and improved supply chain performance. Recently it debuted an enhanced version called RapidResponse Control Tower.

Challenge: A major U.S. food manufacturer and distributor wanted to implement a new warehouse management system using bar code labels to track the movement of products within its warehouses and to customers. A difficult challenge for a 100,000 sq. ft. warehouse with 1,600 different products in inventory.

Today's ERP systems often have much of the needed supply chain management software, they are interoperable, and with them collaboration and visibility problems are minimized, says Mike Tatara, product marketing manager, Epicor Software Corp. In addition, they are highly efficient information repositories.

The world of consumer electronics is a rapidly evolving marketplace, one where manufacturers have to deal with product price erosion and the challenges that come with selling into many layered vertical markets.

The Port of Los Angeles will invest billions of dollars in transportation infrastructure to maintain its ranking as the largest U.S. container port, according to the 2012-2017 strategic plan it just released.