First we would like to clarify that this article is mainly focused on solutions for green packaging involved with e-commerce. Product packaging from all manufacturing is another topic to itself.

In logistics, empty miles refer to the trucks that go back to origin without any freight. This is a serious problem in truck transportation, especially in China as the tolls and the oil price are pretty high. The Ministry of Transport has pointed out the empty miles ratio was about 47% in 1999 but still remained about 40% in 2010. Effort by government and society doesn’t seem to help that much either. However some good initiatives are on the rise. Solutions definitely seem available!

Route optimization is defined as finding the best shipping route for a given set of orders so that it can save cost. As it is a NP-hard problem and Transportation Management Systems (TMS) usually deal with large amount of orders, finding the best route is quite time consuming. As a result TMS systems tend to use lazy algorithms to find routes of moderate quality in a relatively short period of time.  However, a lot of times, the planner does have sufficient time available and TMS should change focus to optimize current routes instead of putting all effort in finding moderately ok new ones.

We all know testing is an important part to secure the success of your projects. The perfect option to do this effectively and with low costs could be through outsourcing. However how do you find the best testing partner out there and what are the essential criteria? These six tips will help you to select the testing partner with the perfect fit to secure the success of your projects.

The Chinese really haven’t been consuming for that long. In the era of Mao, there simply wasn’t much to buy. Now urban Chinese spend their free time in Western-style shopping malls, and in Shanghai and coastal cities, fashion is the new trend. You can find ten of the most interesting facts on the current Chinese consumer here.

According to the 10-year official reports recently released by World Luxury Association on January 11, 2012, China has become the largest luxury market in the world. At the end of December 2011, the total annual consumption of the luxury market in China reached $12.6 billion (not including private jets, yachts and luxury cars), accounting for 28% of the global share.

CEOs and senior executives typically focus on making the sale, the product, and driving down unit cost, but seldom devote the same attention to improving the logistics side of the technology. This is surprisingly shortsighted. As analyst Dwight Klappich at Gartner recently wrote, “Even sophisticated companies that have more global supply chain experience and were early adopters have only automated a small fraction of their global trade operations.”Problems caused by supply chain management often appear to be nightmares elsewhere in the company.

Your organization won't innovate productively unless some underlying factors are in good shape. If "10" is outstanding and "1" is poor, how do you rate your organization on each of these?

In 2003, Goldman Sachs released a report forecasting that by 2041, China will surpass America and become the world largest economy. Since then, the country has been experiencing annual growth of 9-10%. Out of the top 100 retail companies, a quarter of them have operations in China. Over 200 million Chinese natives are learning English, that’s 3 times of the population of U.K. The WPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) reported that China ranks second in total number of patent applications. The list goes on but the message is already crystal clear – China is booming, and it is booming fast!

There are more than a million ways to enhance your Supply Chain Management system. We listed the Top 5 ways most CEOs from the retail and manufacturing industry give credits to.