As global companies increasingly explore dynamic discounting solutions to improve their operating income and provide much needed working capital flows to their supply chain, questions often arise about how government regulations and accounting standards come into play.

A logistics network is like a complex machine. When all the parts mesh and work properly, you have an efficient system that moves freight seamlessly across borders. But remove one piece - or let it get even slightly out of alignment - and the whole supply chain can grind to a halt.

The Global Shippers Forum is calling for container shipping surcharges to be eliminated by 2020.

Dozens of port authorities and marine terminals received port security grants this summer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), but millions of dollars from the $100m program went to local law enforcement agencies and other non-port entities.

It's a big and transformative phenomenon worldwide, so of course it has a buzzy lexicon all its own. You can call it whatever you want - Digital Operations Technology, Industry 4.0, Industry of the Future, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Smart Manufacturing - but you can't ignore it. MESA International offers a concise definition for this wave of change: "Smart manufacturing is the intelligent, real-time orchestration and optimization of business, physical, and digital processes within factories and across the entire value chain."

The largest public companies in the U.S. chose to go even further into debt in 2015 instead of driving cash out of their businesses by improving how they collect from customers, pay suppliers and manage inventory, according to the annual working capital survey from REL, a division of The Hackett Group Inc. Overall working capital performance continued to degrade, reaching poorest performance levels since the 2008 financial crisis.