With the holiday season right around the corner, the International Council of Shopping Centers is forecasting a 3.0-percent sales increase for the traditional November-December holiday period.

The Coca-Cola Company and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria say they plan to leverage the company's global distribution system to help government and non-governmental organizations deliver critical medicines to remote parts of the world, beginning in rural Africa.

Downtime is the enemy of lean. Downtime is, in fact, waste. Idled lines do not add value. Restarting production after unplanned downtime requires more effort, usually expended with less efficiency and worker productivity. This reintroduces waste, which creates added costs that customers do not pay for, yet must be absorbed into cost of goods sold.

It's no mystery why companies emulate their most successful peers. Tried-and-true approaches often seem preferable to starting from scratch, whether for developing new products or running efficient supply chains. The quest for such methods went global during the 1980s and 1990s as European and U.S. companies sought to retool their operations by transplanting Japanese factory practices, such as kanban and just-in-time production. Management consultants - ourselves included - naturally facilitate the process by extolling successful companies as models from which others can learn proven practices that reduce risks.

As work piles up in our in-boxes and on our desks, the question should occur-what important issues am I missing? It is an interesting fact that a high percentage of our critical work and the data we use to make decisions are still outside the operations systems we have-ERP, accounting, modeling and decision support.

Starbucks, Johnson + Johnson, Sprint and 16 other companies have sent a letter to Congress, urging elected officials to extend the wind production tax credit (PTC) before it expires at the end of 2012.

Looking at the 12-month period ending with July 2012, the winery-to-consumer shipping channel has grown to $1.35bn, representing 8.6 percent of the total U.S. wine retail market, according to a report from ShipCompliant and Wines + Vines Magazine.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. lost a bid to dismiss an 11-year-old gender discrimination lawsuit brought on behalf of workers in California after the U.S. Supreme Court barred a lawsuit representing Wal-Mart employees nationwide.

Uncertainty is the only certainty in the current airfreight market, according to Kenji Hashimoto, the new man in charge of American Airlines Cargo.

Although often overlooked, middle-market companies are making positive impacts on the economy and the global supply chain. They are the middle children of the business world, tucked between billion-dollar companies that attract great attention because of their size, and small businesses that grab headlines for their entrepreneurial spirit.