"Frankly, we thought we were a lot better than we were." Could those be the scariest words in business?

As an industry, global consumer products companies have historically underinvested in plants and manufacturing capabilities. In fact, a significant number of organizations may still be running their operations on equipment and processes that were last updated in the prior millennium. Under these circumstances, throughput can rarely keep pace with current needs. At the same time, many of these same companies have made one or more large acquisitions that slow the supply chain down even more: duplication and redundancy at the plant level; disparate operating and ERP systems that cloud visibility; and manual processes that consumed valuable resources.

The first draft of the U.S. Roadmap for Material Handling & Logistics is now available for public review.

For logistics-driven companies, advances in mobile computing and communications in the last decade now are leading us toward what Gartner has called true supply chain execution convergence. The potential gains - lower costs, increased efficiency, less waste, reduced environmental impact, higher customer satisfaction and overall improved profitability - are simply too big to ignore. However, corporate executives and planners should proceed carefully in positioning their companies to get the highest return on their investment in converging supply chain execution technologies.

Apriso, a vendor of global manufacturing software, has made available Apriso for Paperless Manufacturing.

Basware has joined with MasterCard to develop an electronic-payment application which speeds up payment to suppliers upon invoice approval, while extending payment terms for buyers.