With the goal of building up a worldwide network of medium-sized freight forwarders, BuyCo For Growth sought a link to ocean carriers that would provide instant access to schedules, rates and other data critical to the movement of its customers' cargo.

Blount International, a maker of farm, forestry and gardening equipment, needed to get a handle on its global logistics spend. A performance-management tool from Trax Technologies cut costs and helped the company to take a long-range, strategic view of operations.

If our annual 100 Great Supply Chain Partners is about anything, it's about sending a giant thank-you note, in a very public way, to a business partner that has demonstrably helped your business. Whether the partner you single out for recognition is involved in logistics and transportation, technology or in some other aspect of supply chain management, their efforts helped you immeasurably while you concentrated on your core business. And they deserve a shout-out and a public salute.

REZ-1, Inc., a provider of asset management, equipment reservation, billing and reload services to the domestic intermodal industry, has acquired International Asset Systems (IAS), a vendor of cloud-based software for global logistics and transportation management.

For all the talk of "collaboration," the relationship between buyer and supplier in the supply chain is often more like a tug of war: in the end, one side wins, and the other loses.

enVista, a provider of supply-chain consulting and I.T. services, has launched implementation and support services for Microsoft platform-based applications.

As global companies increasingly explore dynamic discounting solutions to improve their operating income and provide much needed working capital flows to their supply chain, questions often arise about how government regulations and accounting standards come into play.

The largest public companies in the U.S. chose to go even further into debt in 2015 instead of driving cash out of their businesses by improving how they collect from customers, pay suppliers and manage inventory, according to the annual working capital survey from REL, a division of The Hackett Group Inc. Overall working capital performance continued to degrade, reaching poorest performance levels since the 2008 financial crisis.