You've probably noticed the term “market intelligence” popping up in supply chain circles more lately. There are two main reasons for this: one is that the economy is making it necessary for supply chain professionals to obtain it, and the other is that new and improved technology is making it easier to get.

As companies continue to manufacture and source materials from overseas, controlling costs remains a top priority for those involved in international trade. One key factor that should be monitored more closely is logistics management, which covers all activities relating to the procurement, transport, transshipment and storage of goods. Depending on the industry sector, supply chain logistics costs account from 5% to 50% of a product’s total landed cost.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a popular topic again, after a 20-year cooling-off period. Whatever happened to AI and why did it go underground for so many years?
The answer is, AI didn’t vanish at all, but rather than emerging as a fully-formed incarnation of “The Jetsons” or “The Terminator,” AI went mainstream. People interact with AI every day, in so many ways that nobody thinks of it as the application of computer intelligence; it’s just another app, like Apple’s Siri or speech recognition capabilities in voice-mail applications like Microsoft Outlook.