Sysco's fiscal first-quarter earnings totaled $453.8 million. The foodservice wholesaler reported revenue of $15.3 billion for the quarter.

Increasing demand for next-day and second-day deliveries has led to larger profits for UPS, and the company's investments in logistics have helped it keep up with customers' needs, says Chairman and CEO David Abney. UPS has made 1,500 commercial deliveries with drones since March and plans to ramp them up in the future, Abney says.

An autonomous truck's recent 1,000-mile trip through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas conducted by TuSimple shows how much progress has been made on automated vehicle technologies, according to a panel at the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals' EDGE conference. The necessary technology to allow for the widespread use of autonomous vehicles should be available in five to seven years, although it will likely take 10 years for such high levels of adoption to happen, panelists said.

Trucking firms added 1,300 jobs last month after three months of job losses, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Trucking companies also reported the slowest year-over-year growth in two-and-a-half years, and some have already reported a decline in third-quarter revenue amid diminishing freight demand and a tepid beginning to fall shipping.

Validity Chief Marketing Officer Charlie Ungashick talks in this interview about why business-to-business marketers should use a deliverability solution for email campaigns, his favorite apps and why customer relationship management software is essential. The ability to "obtain up to date info on how best to contact customers, their preferences, the best time and way to reach out to them, and more, allows companies to create more effective conversations with customers," he says.

Artificial intelligence can help boost e-commerce sales by gathering data, retargeting leads and other functions to improve the customer experience, writes Jacob Wilson. AI can also make recommendations and answer customer questions through chatbots, he writes.

Combat the discouraging effects of nagging negative comments from others by writing about them to negate their power, setting yourself up for small wins to rebuild confidence and developing a mindfulness practice, writes University of Texas at Austin professor Art Markman. "The reason mindfulness techniques work is that they help you to recognize when you are spiraling into a cycle of negative thinking and to break that cycle," he writes.

The best strategies require a logical plan of action and goals but also must be flexible enough to change in a shifting business environment, writes Bill Barnett. "Meaningful strategy gives direction; you know you suffer from strategy neglect when people in your organization don't know how to resolve conflicting priorities," he writes.

This study brings together best practices from leading distributors and their suppliers that were developed through a consortium on Optimizing Channel Compensation. The resulting Channel Alignment Framework is the first-of-its-kind map that seeks to build optimal manufacturer-distributor channels. Distributors need to read this book and buy it for their manufacturer partners. Then they need to sit down with those suppliers and properly plan effective processes to get the supplier market access while meeting distributor investment needs.

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If you missed our recent live webinar, "Reboot the Real World: Beating Disruption through Human-Centric Innovations," sponsored by SAP, you can replay the webinar now. In it, you'll hear Mark Dancer explore how to win by being human, engage customers through shared interests and mutual advantage, and optimize benefits through intentional combinations of human and technology forces of change. He shared critical findings from NAW's upcoming Innovate to Dominate research study.