As retailers look ahead to the holiday selling season, e-commerce platform provider Volusion predicts that online sales during the holiday season will grow 9 percent compared to last year for small- to medium-sized businesses.

Challenge: Recently a well-established European manufacturer of housewares decided to enter the U.S. market. Knowing how important logistics would be to the startup process, their first decision was to select an ideal logistics partner to help develop an entry plan for the American marketplace.

Epicor Software Corp. has created the Epicor Eagle N Series of retail-management software.

Challenge: A large manufacturer of flashlights was in need of a robust business integration solution to manage its global supply chain. Their resource-constrained IT department was looking for an automated solution that could help reduce VAN costs and be rapidly deployed with minimal staff involvement.

Challenge: The growth experienced by one of the largest restaurant and convenience-store chains in the United States from new, remodeled and same-store sales growth had pushed the limits of this company's current warehouse operations and transportation network.

Reefer capacity on the containership fleet is expected to increase by 22 percent over the next five years, at the expense of a declining specialized reefer fleet, according to Drewry's latest Reefer Shipping Market Annual Review & Forecast.

When Kevin Smith and his partners started a solar energy firm in Santa Monica in 2008, they expected to sell their technology to advanced economies in Europe and the United States. But much of the action has been in a part of the world Smith initially wrote off: Africa.

Icix, a vendor of applications for global supply-chain risk management, has developed Direct Test.

Challenge: For one of the largest purchasers of wines and spirits in the U.S., orders that arrive in late afternoon must be routed, cases picked per store order, and loaded that day for deliveries beginning at 6:00 a.m. the next morning. Daily order volumes can fluctuate from 18,000 cases per day to 32,000 cases per day, making labor management and transportation capacity management a challenge.