A group of 17 American retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and Macy's Inc., have signed on to a five-year agreement to help improve safety at garment factories in Bangladesh.

Across industries, manufacturers pride themselves on quality but put top emphasis on reducing overall costs. And while these may seem like conflicting priorities, they can be explained by the concurrent demands of the internal economic drivers of an organization and the external customer requirements for quality and efficiency. As such, these priorities are here to stay, especially as the consumer becomes increasingly empowered and publicly vocal. In recent years, product quality and safety have become tightly integrated with traceability and supplier scorecards. But for manufacturers with foresight to proactively implement a comprehensive traceability system before a contamination problem occurs, there is an opportunity to provide their organizations with the ability to dramatically improve response time, implement corrective measures, and minimize repercussions to the bottom line and the brand, should a problem arise.

Employees at the Chinese factories of Apple supplier Foxconn continue to work beyond the country's legal limit of 49 hours a week, according to a report from the Fair Labor Association (FLA). But the Taiwanese manufacturer is making overall steady progress in improving the working conditions at a select group of factories in China, it said.

The latest spate of auto recalls came last month when auto giants Honda, Nissan, Toyota and Mazda were focused to recall more than 3.4 million vehicles as a result of faulty air bags originating from Takata Corp in Japan. Since the initial announcement, BMW has come forward with a related recall action of more than 200,000 of their cars.

Dell OEM Solutions announced that it has worked with Microsoft Corp. to become a global distributor, outsource manufacturer and integrator for Windows Embedded products.