With the holiday season over, import cargo volume at the nation's major retail container ports is expected to slowly decline through the first quarter of the year, according to the monthly Global Port Tracker report released by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates.

Want to get a sense of how new federal regulations will affect transportation tomorrow? Look at California today.

While there has been much talk over the past 10 years or so about "collaboration," much of it has been focused on external supply chain collaboration. It seems that many companies neglected to get their own houses in order before looking outside their own supply chains, according to a University of Tennessee report entitled Bending the Chain: The Surprising Challenge of Integrating Purchasing and Logistics.