While President Barack Obama and other Democratic politicians clear their throats about proposing new gun control laws sometime next year, the marketplace is responding swiftly to the Newtown, Conn., elementary school massacre.

Companies can meet the challenge of ever-growing complexity in their global operations by synching their plant and supply-chain processes. Eric Green, vice president of solution strategy with Apriso, shows how.

Tudespensa.com (Your Pantry), a Spanish online supermarket, delivers food, household cleaning supplies, toiletries and other products to customers throughout Spain, from its central warehouse located in Madrid. To ensure that the high volume of goods are delivered quickly, and at the scheduled time and place, its warehouse employs radio frequency identification to help it load ordered goods into the proper delivery vehicle and in the correct sequence, according to Jose Vicente Caballero, the logistics manager of DLR, a provider of controlled temperature-storage and order-picking services.

Robert Byrne, CEO of Terra Technology, discusses highlights of Terra's 2012 benchmarking study on forecasting, which is based on raw data collected from the major CPG companies that are Terra's customers. Byrne explains why forecast accuracy is moving in the wrong direction and what companies can do to correct this trend.

The retail industry will lose an estimated $3.48bn to return fraud this holiday season, down from $3.73bn last year, according to the National Retail Federation's annual Return Fraud Survey, completed by loss prevention executives at 103 retail companies. Annual return fraud will cost retailers an estimated $14.37bn in 2011, up slightly from $13.66bn in 2010.

The trend of manufacturers "re-shoring" their operations to the western hemisphere is real. Greg S. Anderson, president of Co-eXprise Inc., talks about the challenges involved in executing that strategy.