Over the next 10 years, online retail will continue to gain popularity in both developed and emerging markets and as a result, logistics companies are set to play a key role in providing vital supply chain management solutions that are able to evolve with consumers' changing shopping habits.

Demand planning has a big impact on business performance. Planning error can put revenue at risk by driving component shortages. Persistent planning biases can tie up cash by driving excess inventory. Furthermore, the act of planning and dealing with planning error is time consuming and drives costly overhead. In fact, it is common for supply chain management executives to cite "planning errors" as the greatest obstacle they face to achieving their goals and objectives.

Descartes Systems Group has acquired Customs Info LLC, a U.S.-based provider of trade data content to populate global trade management systems and streamline trade automation.

LLamasoft Inc., a vendor of supply-chain design software, has developed a new release of Transportation Guru, its application for transportation network design.

We're all familiar with maturity curves, but how helpful are they really? Telling a company how mature they are, based on academic factors, means next to nothing if it's not rooted in practical applications that relate to a procurement professional’s day-to-day work.

The Middle East offers "extremely lucrative" opportunities for companies able to take advantage of the region's emergence as a global logistics hub, said Essa Al-Saleh, president and CEO of Agility Global Integrated Logistics.