With 2016 coming to a close, it's time for another helping of supply-chain predictions for the year ahead, courtesy of the San Francisco Roundtable of the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals.

The new era of retail isn't just about the internet. Welcome to the world of the pop-up store.

The more complex a company's supply chain, the more challenging it is to devise a sustainability program that ensures environmental protection from design and manufacturing to packaging and from product transportation to end-of-life disposal and recycling. A comprehensive plan that's truly innovative is called for.

Wu Haishan was at Princeton studying how schools of fish swim together when the crowd behavior of a much bigger group grabbed his attention: his 1.35 billion fellow Chinese. It was Lunar New Year back home in 2014, and Baidu, operator of the country's biggest search engine, had created an animation showing all the trips the Chinese had made during the holiday, which demographers say is the largest annual human migration anywhere. Wu, who'd seen the animation, soon joined Baidu as a data scientist in Beijing. With the company's vast amounts of user location information, he's come up with ingenious ways to measure economic activity.