Although the overall freight forwarding market grew by 3.1 percent to $125.85bn in 2012, Transport Intelligence's report, Global Freight Forwarding 2013, suggests this figure is misleading as the positive growth was entirely attributed to the sea freight sector.

In the world of enterprise management software, logistics and transportation has often been seen as a very isolated island. Those of us on the inside know that the logistics world continues to be just as fragmented and disconnected as it was 20 or 30 years ago. Logistics providers operate blindly within the supply chain, and have little idea of what is happening upstream or downstream. It's a fundamental problem that is especially ripe for disruption. Get ready, because major change is on the horizon.

Among the biggest things that will affect the freight markets this year are the return of pricing power to carriers and the re-shoring/nearshoring phenomenon, according to CarrierDirect's semi-annual forecast on the state of the domestic freight industry.

Dick Boer, the chief executive officer of Ahold, which has 3,000 stores, mostly supermarkets, across Europe and the United States, says the internet has vastly changed retail and the grocery business.

If the time is right for U.S. manufacturers of all sizes to consider modernizing their operations, it is important to first look at modernizing their supply chain and logistics operations in order to optimize potential investments. Manufacturers must think holistically about their business before making these decisions, and this includes looking at their supply chain and distribution models and the impacts of these investments on their operations.

In a placid lagoon about a mile inland from the Atlantic coast in southeast Nicaragua, the mast of Cornelius Vanderbilt's dredge boat rises out of the water. The railroad tycoon abandoned it along with his dream of building an inter-oceanic canal in the 1850s. More than 160 years and several failed plans later, Wang Jing, a 40-year-old Chinese telecommunications billionaire, has emerged as the next mogul to give it a go.