In light of all the hacker attacks in the news, is there insurance that covers smaller businesses in case of an attack? Yes, there is.

Many shippers and 3PLs want a warehouse management solution - and one that is quipped with such capabilities as electronic data interchange - yet more than a third of businesses still use paper, pen or spreadsheets as their WMS.

There is no shortage of software-as-a-service (SaaS)–based manufacturing enterprise resource planning software offerings nowadays, for almost any vertical manufacturing market segment. But while cloud and hosted solutions are routine for many types of business software across various industries, manufacturing businesses still express a lot of skepticism, uncertainty and concern about the applicability of cloud software to their business.

Brazilian children's clothing wholesaler Brascol is tagging the merchandise that retailers buy at its wholesale outlet, and has installed RFID-enabled checkout system to enable faster purchases by those customers. The RFID system, supplied by iTag Technology, relies on RFID tags made with NXP Semiconductors' Ucode7 UHF chips to quickly identify a shopping cart's contents.

Few decisions have as much power to make or break a product's success and profitability as those around the sourcing of direct materials. The components, parts and assemblies that go into making products not only account for 70 percent of an average manufacturer's annual spend, they have a significant impact on such critical competitive factors as brand reputation, time to market and supply chain reliability.