Sage North America say the results of a snapshot survey of small to medium-sized business manufacturers indicate the general health of their businesses is pretty good, and use of their enterprise resource planning systems has benefited them.

For businesses that manufacture aerospace, pharmaceutical or other high-value items, even a single component built into a product can be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Losing track of a basket filled with parts can thus be extremely costly, due not only to each component's cost but the potential loss of production time if assembly is delayed. The solution may be RFID technology, according to Marlin Steel Wire Products, a producer of custom wire baskets and other metal products.

Panjiva, provider of a business-to-business platform for managing global trade, has made available a new search engine.

Your customer service representative answers a call from an irate customer. "This darn thing I bought just doesn't work!" he exclaims. "I've tried and tried to get help from your service folks, but they're always late and they can't fix it either. I've had it with you guys. I want my money back!" Big Data can help you retain that customer.

Those who make the investment in business intelligence and the cloud will realize improved cost and operational efficiencies, expanded real-time collaboration with customers, vendors and partners as well as faster and more personalized customer relationships. But how do you get there?

It's not news that salespeople don't like to show their work. Customer relationship management systems were designed to not only collect and mine customer data but also let CFOs and other executives keep a closer eye on their enigmatic sellers. But there's a problem with CRM systems: many salespeople don't want to take the time to use them.

Tufts Medical Center, a 415-bed teaching hospital in Boston, has saved $1.5m on stents, angioplasty balloons and other implantable devices, based on information provided by a radio frequency identification inventory-management system deployed within its catheterization, electrophysiology and interventional radiology laboratories.

Downtime is the enemy of lean. Downtime is, in fact, waste. Idled lines do not add value. Restarting production after unplanned downtime requires more effort, usually expended with less efficiency and worker productivity. This reintroduces waste, which creates added costs that customers do not pay for, yet must be absorbed into cost of goods sold.

As work piles up in our in-boxes and on our desks, the question should occur-what important issues am I missing? It is an interesting fact that a high percentage of our critical work and the data we use to make decisions are still outside the operations systems we have-ERP, accounting, modeling and decision support.