Just as homeowners are more likely to renovate their current homes rather than purchase a new one when the economy is soft, so too are many manufacturers opting to maintain and repair their existing equipment rather than making substantial capital investments in new systems.

There is a huge consolidation going on in the ERP market today. The market seems healthy, and some of the participants are really quite active.

While many retailers are receiving merchandise with RFID tags attached by their suppliers, others are still daunted by the prospect of employing radio frequency identification for inventory-tracking purposes. Many RFID deployments include the installation of one or more fixed readers, as well as software and integration services.

After demonstrating significant success with lean manufacturing, Johnson & Johnson decided to apply lean principles for reducing waste to its supply chain.

Oracle Corp. has developed a new application under the JD Edwards brand: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne One View Reporting.

Infor, a vendor of multiple business applications, has formed a strategic partnership with Business + Decision, an international consulting and systems-integration firm.

The savings that can be retrieved by automating and rationalizing approval and purchasing processes in small and mid-sized companies are palpable. A 2009 Aberdeen Group study estimated that "improving the percentage of all non-payroll, tax, tariff and fee-related spend" - that is, indirect, nonstrategic expenses - brought under the management of a dedicated group can help enterprises "achieve a 5% to 20% cost savings for each dollar brought under spend management".

A few years ago, when Bill Weeks was CIO at a leasing company, a vendor pitched some software intended to manage leasing throughout Europe. Weeks was skeptical. "We noticed that half the stuff they were showing us was PowerPoint slides and not actual functionality. We decided it wasn't strong enough to run a business on." He and his team decided to pass.

Now that software as a service and the broader cloud computing concept have gained widespread recognition and acceptance, it will be interesting to see whether online marketplaces will become a preferred method for acquiring these on-demand resources.

HighJump Software has created a hosted version of its electronic data interchange (EDI) tool for users of the Sage 100 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.