Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software doesn't live up to its acronym. Forget about planning - it doesn't do much of that - and forget about resource, a throwaway term.

Build it and they will come. That is the view many organizations maintain about their data lakes and data warehouses. Companies are rapidly investing in systems and processes to retain business data that they know is valuable. But they have no clue what to do with it.

The top manufacturing facility of Toyota transmissions isn't based in Japan but in Durham, North Carolina. The AW North Carolina (AWNC) plant - a subsidiary of AW, which is based in Anjo City, Japan - churns out more than 600,000 automatic transmissions per year for models such as the Camry, Tundra, Tacoma, Sequoia and, most recently, the Rav4.

Market hype and growing interest in artificial intelligence (AI) are pushing established software vendors to introduce AI into their product strategy, creating considerable confusion in the process, according to recent research by Gartner, Inc. Analysts predict that by 2020, AI technologies will be virtually pervasive in almost every new software product and service.

Some 84 percent of businesses have suffered supplier failure over the last three years, according to a report.