Large UK manufacturers lost more than £58m in 2013 following a raft of preventable supply chain issues, including firms' failures to deliver goods on time.

Three stages are commonly used to categorize an organization's maturity in their use of business intelligence and analytics technologies: Descriptive, or what happened in the past? Predictive, or what will (probably) happen in the future? Prescriptive, or what should we do to change the future?

As part of a 10-year effort to improve technology in the safety inspection arena, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced it will be coordinating a field test to see if wireless technology can be used to conduct roadside inspections.

ABI Research forecasts that revenues from maintenance analytics will total $9.1bn this year. Following a CAGR of 22 percent, the market’s size will reach $24.7bn in 2019, driven largely by adoption of predictive analytics and M2M connectivity.

Ongoing innovation at Men's Wearhouse has led to the launch of its omni-channel inventory program, which gives customers visibility and access to all merchandise within the company's distribution center and its 900-plus retail locations from one location. Now, regardless of whether a customer is shopping in a single store or online, they can see all merchandise available to them throughout the company and pick up any item at the store of their choosing.

At the beginning of 2013, Williams-Sonoma outlined four key areas of focus: strengthening its brands, laying the foundation for global expansion, investing in supply chain and investing in the technologies and infrastructure that underlay all these initiatives.

Today's fleet managers are confronted with multiple challenges, from ongoing driver shortages to complex and oftentimes restrictive state and federal regulations, and that's just for starters. Add to that the specific concerns of food shippers, and the picture becomes even more complicated.

A huge increase in the number of devices making up the Internet of Things (IoT) will have a significant impact on how the supply chain will operate, according to a report by analyst firm Gartner.