In a digital age where a delay of seconds or one human error can be the cause of lost revenue, wasted resources or unhappy customers, good technology becomes critical to run a business. Twelve years after the ocean shipping industry adopted e-commerce tools that resulted in an average savings of $100,000 per year and hundreds of thousands of labor hours per week, the final steps in the shipping process - invoicing and payment - are still catching up.

"Multichannel" (or even better, "omnichannel") is something almost every self-respecting retailer wants to be. But most pure-play internet vendors resist the idea that actual stores, with their rents, payrolls and security cameras, ought to be one of those channels. The thought of having the same costs as bricks-and-mortar competitors "scares the living daylights out of me," says Charles Hunt, owner of Duvet and Pillow Warehouse, a fast-growing online retailer. Yet things are changing.

Scarmor, a logistics subsidiary of the French hypermarket chain E.Leclerc, has installed a network of RFID readers that works without middleware at 35 dock doors within two warehouses. The company continues to roll out the technology that will be used to track pallets being moved from distribution centers to roughly 58 E.Leclerc retail sites throughout the French province of Brittany.

Walmart, Macy's, JCPenny, Marks & Spencer, Façonnable, American Apparel, and others are implementing item-level RFID in a big way. Last year, well over one billion apparel items were tagged. That number is expected to rise substantially this year.

IT organizations can expect to see small increases in operating budgets for 2013, even as cutbacks continue across other parts of business services, including finance, HR and procurement, according to new IT key issues research from The Hackett Group Inc.

Wider adoption of standards is key to supply chain efficiency and meeting new consumer needs, according to a report entitled The Future of Standards in the Consumer Goods & Retail Industry: Cut Costs and Meet New Consumer Needs. The authors call on the industry to introduce simplified programs to help users embrace and deploy standards while enabling provision of standardized product data to consumers.

Analyst Insight: As traditional retailers feel the sting of Amazon's long tail whip, e-commerce and retail are merging into omni-channel strategies. In the Connected Age everyone is always connected to everything, always on, and location based. Just as the power shifted from manufacturer to retailer, the power in the retail channel has now shifted to the consumer who can buy anything from anyone, anytime, from anywhere. You better know your customer and your market to succeed. - Rich Sherman, Supply Chain Discipline Expert at Trissential