A railway company that operates passenger and freight trains throughout Hong Kong has boosted the accuracy and efficiency of data capture related to the maintenance of its passenger cars and locomotives, thanks to the use of active RFID tags and readers provided by Hong Kong RFID Ltd.

With omni-channel, mobile, online competition and other forces at play, retail is in a state of dynamic transformation. Item-level RFID is playing a role in that transformation and major retailers are starting to adopt it in a big way.

Analyst Insight: The top reason field service agents are not able to resolve a customer issue the first time when on site is due to not having the right part to solve the problem. Thus in order to ensure that customers are happy, and beyond, top-performing service organizations in Aberdeen's recent Convergence of People and Parts research have focused on strategies to integrate field service with parts management to meet the needs of the customer and ensure profitability. - Aly Pinder, Senior Research Associate, Aberdeen Group

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.

Analyst Insight: With the trend toward multichannel and omnichannel supply chains, pressure is mounting for inventories that were intended for one type of demand to be called on to serve another. This conflict can lead to underserving the demand for which the inventory was planned and raise issues between organizational entities that lean toward protectionism, undermining competitiveness. Solving this issue requires effective decision-making processes that occur in real time based on corporate objectives. - Ralph Cox, Senior Principal, Tompkins International

Integrating supply chain planning and execution is vital to today's businesses, but 80 percent of the data that most companies need to achieve this integration lies outside their four walls. Mark Cosway, vice president of industry sales at GT Nexus, explains a new approach to solving this problem.