Major shifts in cost competitiveness around the world over the past decade are starting to spur a number of companies to change their global sourcing and manufacturing investment strategies, according to The Boston Consulting Group's report, The Shifting Economics of Global Manufacturing: How Cost Competitiveness Is Changing Worldwide.

TE Connectivity is a $13bn world leader in designing and manufacturing electronic connectivity products for a range of industries. Ruud Somers, director of global network design, discusses how the company uses supply chain modeling and optimization solutions to support the high service demands of its global network.

Karen Hogan, global director of operational excellence at Southco, discusses the challenges of multi-echelon inventory optimization and how Southco has used solutions from LLamasoft to integrate IO into a monthly planning process.

Global supply chain risk reached an 18-month low in Q2 2014, decreasing for three consecutive quarters for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis, according to the Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply's (CIPS) latest CIPS Risk Index (CRI).

As retailers look ahead to the holiday selling season, e-commerce platform provider Volusion predicts that online sales during the holiday season will grow 9 percent compared to last year for small- to medium-sized businesses.

AeroScout Industrial, a provider of active radio frequency identification solutions, has installed an "Internet of Everything" system at a power tools plant owned by its parent company, Stanley Black & Decker, located in Reynosa, Mexico. The solution has enabled the firm to improve product throughput and labor efficiency, and to reduce the quantity of inventory stored on site for assembly-line replenishment.