In the face of challenging economic headwinds, consumer goods manufacturers have focused on cutting costs and optimizing working capital. Those routes still offer opportunity, but recent analysis indicates that traditional assumptions regarding tradeoffs among costs, inventory and service don't always hold true, and leading companies are using new, customer-centric levers to unlock value. These actions could yield a potential value of nearly $50bn industrywide, according to research conducted by The Boston Consulting Group on behalf of the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA).

Challenge: A large food distributor conducted a study to quantify the financial impact to transportation of implementing tighter store delivery time windows. These more restrictive windows were beneficial to the store, as they provided more consistent delivery times. However, before committing to their stores, the customer needed to fully understand the transportation cost implications of operationalizing this change.

Challenge: Static DC routes had not been reset in years - this presented an opportunity to save miles and shipments. All stores serviced by the DC are on a 2 day a week delivery pattern that would not change, although the specific delivery pattern assigned to a given store could change.

Challenge: A large and growing Canadian brewer was challenged with constrained brewing capacity and seasonal demand. They needed to improve their forecasting and production planning in order to make maximal use if their capacity and serve as much demand as possible. To make matters even more challenging, they needed to do this across several breweries and a national distribution network.

Challenge: A multi-channel, high end goods retailer was interested in expanding into the Middle East, Australia, Asia and Europe. They needed an international support network that allowed for the reliability, speed and cost effectiveness that would let them develop short- and long-term forecasts.

Challenge: A large construction materials manufacturer was struggling to keep up with its growing supply chain needs. Coordination of international and domestic suppliers, vendors and shipments was beginning to overwhelm it.

Challenge: The client is an industrial distributor experiencing tremendous growth. The company's distribution center capacity was taxed. Furthermore, operational costs were rising because the distribution center lacked the processes and systems to support rising demand, specifically: an inefficient picking methodology was elongating order fulfillment times; pickers were walking too far in between picks due to improper slotting; and aging equipment components were causing bottlenecks.

Cryopak, a specialist in cold-chain packaging, has added capabilities to its thermal performance and testing laboratory in Edison, N.J.

SciQuest Inc., a provider of cloud-based applications for spend management, has acquired CombineNet, a vendor of sourcing and procurement software.