Congress has moved one step closer to closing a decades-old loophole that has given online retailers an artificial competitive advantage over their brick and mortar competitors with hearings on the Marketplace Equity Act (HR 3179).

The MIT Forum for Supply Chain Innovation has formed a Manufacturing Technology Advisory Board to bring MIT academia and research together with major technology providers and industry leaders to collaborate on key issues in the U.S. manufacturing industry, such as technology, process innovation, supply chain risk and reshoring enablers.

Blake Johnson, consulting professor with Stanford University, details the value that companies can derive from supply-chain risk and flexibility management, and how sales and operations planning can help.

In an effort to prevent higher freight rates and more expensive cruise prices, Alaska has sued to block rules intended to limit pollution from large ships.

The majority of consumers in the world's richest markets say they are feeling insecure and anxious and are struggling to save. They have tightened their belts and are buckled in for a sustained period of low or no income growth - a world that feels like the 1930s or the Lost Decade in Japan.

At the end of this month, 211 million Ikea catalogs will be sent off into the world. If one lands on your doorstep, you'll want to have your smartphone handy.

On July 17, a wide range of third-party products on Amazon showed special pricing: one cent. The pricing glitch was, yet again, caused by some third-party integration and a coding error.

Aberdeen Group has published a slue of new reports from its various practices on such topics as sales and marketing effectiveness, IT infrastructure/storage and virtualization, and supply chain management.

Last year saw record revenues and employment among the world's biggest construction companies, according to International Construction magazine's Top 200 ranking, although profitability was poorer than in 2010.