Infor, Epicor, Aptean, QAD, UNIT4, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and others all have the challenge of owning many solutions built over 20 years ago or more. In fact, many enterprises are still running twenty-year-old software. Still, many firms have yet to buy their first ERP, and they will certainly not purchase the old ERPs written in RPG, BASIC and ABAP or with Progress databases and so on.

There is no shortage of software-as-a-service (SaaS)–based manufacturing enterprise resource planning software offerings nowadays, for almost any vertical manufacturing market segment. But while cloud and hosted solutions are routine for many types of business software across various industries, manufacturing businesses still express a lot of skepticism, uncertainty and concern about the applicability of cloud software to their business.

Brazilian children's clothing wholesaler Brascol is tagging the merchandise that retailers buy at its wholesale outlet, and has installed RFID-enabled checkout system to enable faster purchases by those customers. The RFID system, supplied by iTag Technology, relies on RFID tags made with NXP Semiconductors' Ucode7 UHF chips to quickly identify a shopping cart's contents.