Ian Darley, an inventory specialist in the mining industry, tells how he helped to pioneer a new method for storing materials on site - and eliminating a substantial amount of unnecessary packaging.

There is a huge consolidation going on in the ERP market today. The market seems healthy, and some of the participants are really quite active.

While many retailers are receiving merchandise with RFID tags attached by their suppliers, others are still daunted by the prospect of employing radio frequency identification for inventory-tracking purposes. Many RFID deployments include the installation of one or more fixed readers, as well as software and integration services.

Oracle Corp. has developed a new application under the JD Edwards brand: JD Edwards EnterpriseOne One View Reporting.

Infor, a vendor of multiple business applications, has formed a strategic partnership with Business + Decision, an international consulting and systems-integration firm.

U.S. Xpress Enterprises has joined with Maritime-Ontario Freight Lines Ltd. to launch a North American cross-border shipping service.

The savings that can be retrieved by automating and rationalizing approval and purchasing processes in small and mid-sized companies are palpable. A 2009 Aberdeen Group study estimated that "improving the percentage of all non-payroll, tax, tariff and fee-related spend" - that is, indirect, nonstrategic expenses - brought under the management of a dedicated group can help enterprises "achieve a 5% to 20% cost savings for each dollar brought under spend management".

A few years ago, when Bill Weeks was CIO at a leasing company, a vendor pitched some software intended to manage leasing throughout Europe. Weeks was skeptical. "We noticed that half the stuff they were showing us was PowerPoint slides and not actual functionality. We decided it wasn't strong enough to run a business on." He and his team decided to pass.

HighJump Software has created a hosted version of its electronic data interchange (EDI) tool for users of the Sage 100 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.