Give Congress credit for finally coming to agreement on a new surface transportation bill, after months of acrimonious debate and nine extensions of the old funding law, known as SAFETY-LU. The fact that the Senate and House of Representatives could agree on anything at all is, I suppose, reason to applaud, especially given the toxic atmosphere that chokes the political scene today. And this new measure is something more than a "kick-the-can-down-the-road" effort, given that it maintains current highway funding levels until September 2014.

This past month, non-asset-based third-party logistics companies took a big leap forward in their fight to join the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT), one of our nation's leading supply chain security programs. The Department of Homeland Security approved port security legislation that includes creating a pilot program for non-asset-based 3PLs to participate in C-TPAT. The pilot program will give entry to C-TPAT to five 3PLs for one year.

The expansion of global supply chains has meant an exponential growth of the risk of disruptions to those networks. Catastrophic events, such as the Japanese earthquake and Hurricane Katrina, have highlighted the need for analysis of disruption risk and development of mitigation plans to cope with them. In addition, trends such as globalization, heavy reliance on transportation and communication infrastructures, and lean manufacturing have led to an increase in the vulnerability of supply networks. Furthermore, nodes on supply chains are very often interrelated, causing these vulnerabilities to propagate rapidly.