We come again to our annual Quest for Quality issue, in which we recognize those companies our readers have singled out for providing the best logistics services in their particular niches.

The winners deserve applause for their efforts to provide reliable and efficient services to shippers. Shippers, under constant pressure from their own customers to provide better products faster and more reliably, depend on logistics providers who understand the need for continuous improvement.

That phrase—continuous improvement—is not heard so often these days, but it still lies at the core of quality efforts for any business. As supply chain management thinking has evolved, the focus on improvement has expanded beyond the individual company, initially to its first-tier suppliers, and then to what has been called the extended enterprise. Logistics service providers, which provide critical links between segments of the supply chain, are crucial to supply chain effectiveness from initial transportation of raw materials to delivery to the final customer.

One of the major components of any quality effort is a way to measure performance. A number of tools have been developed over the years: We look at some of the latest developments in supply chain software in our story beginning on Page 49.

Providing excellent logistics service requires daily attention to execution, the aforementioned continuous improvement, and long-term vision, especially where building infrastructure is concerned. Other stories in this issue highlight some of the practical difficulties industry players face in order to handle growing volumes of freight and pressure for better performance. In our story on the railroads, beginning on Page 63, we report on a new study examining whether railroads can provide reliable carload service and do it profitably enough to satisfy their investors. Our Global Logistics feature, which opens on Page 55, looks at the efforts by many Asian ports to improve their ability to handle enormous numbers of containers.

Over the years, we've chronicled many of the cooperative efforts between logistics providers and their customers to make logistics networks more effective and efficient. Even the best-laid plans falter sometimes, however, for a variety of reasons: flooded tracks, snowbound highways, and unusual traffic congestion, among others. Witness the recent failure of Webvan, the online retailer that closed its doors last month. Earlier this year, we featured the company's attempts to succeed where others had failed. The company saw the application of a sophisticated logistics and materials-handling strategy as crucial to any chance of success. But time and money ran out, and those efforts failed. The business model for a profitable Internet-based grocer remains unproven. Nonetheless, Webvan's distribution process will likely be studied for some time to come for its efforts to manage multiple small shipments—a challenge many more shippers are certain to face.