So collaborative purchasing appears feasible for the restaurant industry. But what about other business sectors? Can different companies - even direct competitors - really band together to get better deals from their suppliers?

Honeywell Aerospace has started applying high-memory RFID labels to two of the parts it manufactures for the aerospace industry, with the goal of enabling the part's record to be tracked directly on the tag from birth through use by airlines, and repair by Honeywell.

Analyst Insight: The CPG industry's supply chain performance is middle of the pack: more mature than chemical or pharmaceutical companies and less mature than high-tech and electronics manufacturing companies. Several factors are at work to shift the processes to improve performance. Focus is shifting from inside-out to outside-in, from a vertical horizontal siloed orientation to horizontal processes that can better sense and respond, and from a supply chain focused only on product delivery to a value network focused on serving the customer. - Lora Cecere, Founder of Supply Chain Insights

Analyst Insight: Driving richer connectivity and communications as well as human dialogue amongst partners or team members is changing the face of business and society. We are moving from siloed enterprises to federations of partnerships and communities of ideas that think and execute in streams - not rigid processes. This is changing not only how we work, but the technologies that support us. - Sree Hameed, Vice President, ChainLink Research

European Commission delivered a bleak assessment Friday of Europe's economic prospects, saying that growth would be just 0.1 percent in the 27-nation European Union in 2013 and that the 17-nation euro zone would shrink 0.3 percent over the same period.