Global coat and outerwear manufacturer Herman Kay Co. is carrying out a five-phase RFID deployment to track the garments that it produces and ships to customers.

Google Inc. will start testing a delivery service for fresh food and groceries in two U.S. cities later this year, stepping up competition with online retailer Amazon.com Inc. and start-up Instacart Inc.

RangeMe, an online platform serving the consumer packaged goods (CPG) sector, has launched operations in the U.S.

Transportation capacity problems have been a volatile issue over the past 20 years or so. A thorough analysis provided by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, in its "State of Logistics" report, indicates that by 2017, shippers in the U.S. will face shortages in trucking resources again, predominantly a trucker shortage, in the near future due to an array of developments that may cause shippers to find loads left on the ground, shipping costs rapidly escalating, and shrinking profit margins that stun stakeholders.

Pharmaceutical companies are running hard to keep pace with changes brought about by digital technology. Mobile communications, the cloud, advanced analytics, and the Internet of Things are among the innovations that are starting to transform the healthcare industry in the ways they have already transformed the media, retail and banking industries. Pharma executives are well aware of the disruptive potential and are experimenting with a wide range of digital initiatives.

Six companies dominate the business of farm supplies. The interest of Monsanto, the world's biggest seed producer, in buying Syngenta, the largest agrochemicals firm, had threatened to whittle them down to five. That raised worries about whether the reduction in competition would mean less innovation - and thus slower improvements in crop yields - as well as higher costs for farmers.

In 2010, when Netflix was still early into its shift from DVD rentals to online movies and shows, it started using Amazon Web Services, the retailer's cloud computing division. Now that Netflix streams 100 million-plus hours of video every day, it's sticking with Amazon partly because of Amazon's scale and features, and partly because switching vendors "would be a significant multi-year effort," says Yury Izrailevsky, Netflix's vice president for cloud and platform engineering.