It only makes sense that The 3M Company, with a business model resting almost entirely upon technology, would eventually get around to applying it to the supply chain.

Analyst Insight: You design a product, source it, build it, store it, ship it, and your consumer enjoys it... then what? It is inevitable that at some point the original intended use will be over and the product will reach its end of life. What happens now is a topic that is piquing the interests of many traditional and non-traditional supply-chain players. The challenge lays in how to efficiently reintegrate or disposition these products. - Melissa Hadhazy, associate partner, Infosys Consulting

Analyst Insight: Global manufacturers must meet the growing number of "green" regulations that are focused on sustainability. From the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive to the United States Conflict Minerals Directive as well as the European Union (EU) directives of Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), manufacturers must comply with a multitude of regulations that can have a major impact on their business and their supply chain. – Chuck Cimalore, CTO, Omnify Software

Somebody out there is talking about your product. And you had better be listening.

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

Grace Medical Center, a 123-bed hospital in the Grace Health System, has prevented $15,000 in food from spoiling since August by installing a real-time location system (RTLS) to monitor the temperatures of refrigerators and freezers, the hospital says. The system, made by ZulaFly, consists of the company's own cloud-hosted Fuzion software platform to capture data from CenTrak RFID temperature sensors.

Global companies today live or die by the effectiveness of their social compliance programs.