To remain competitive in today's fast-paced, global environment, manufacturers are adopting newly designed, high-speed wireless networks to help take better control of plant operations. Engineers and operators are being armed with iPads, laptops and high-speed scanners running on these networks to bring their facilities up-to-date with instantaneous, real-time communication.

Mobile is completely different from anything you've done before, and you need to throw conventional wisdom onto the dust heap of out-of-date thinking. You may have a bunch of people in business and IT that are telling you how you should approach mobile, but beware. They might not even recognize that mobile is different in every way from previous technology waves.

ALK Technologies Inc. is offering a new version of CoPilot Truck, its vehicle-specific GPS navigation aid for professional drivers.

There has been enough hype about mobile shopping in general and mobile coupons in particular that you could easily be forgiven if you thought coupons and loyalty cards on mobile phones were a done deal, already available and in use today. The elephant in the room is that the bright clean crisp barcode image you see displayed on your smartphone's screen cannot be read by the majority of barcode scanners used in retail today.

At four Minnesota stores, a major U.S. automotive battery supplier has added radio frequency identification technology to storage racks, making it possible for the company to view the locations of its products and replenish stock at the appropriate times, thereby enabling it to provide improved services to its distributors, dealers and retailers.

Intelleflex, a provider of on-demand data visibility solutions for supply chains and asset tracking, has rolled out the Intelleflex CMR-6100, a fully integrated cellular-enabled, GPS-equipped, multi-protocol RFID reader with support for the ISO Class 3 battery-assisted passive and EPCglobal C1G2 passive standards. Intelleflex ZEST Data Services, a cloud-based repository for aggregating, warehousing and sharing information across the supply chain, facilitates on-demand access to actionable data for improved supply chain operations to provide a complete picture of data spanning the entire supply chain.

BT Global Services provides managed networked IT services for business and government organizations around the world. Its expertise begins at home, says Keith Sherry, the company's general manager of supply chain solutions. BT procures some $16bn in products and services for 30,000 engineers and 1.3 million customers.

California-based auto glass wholesaler Mygrant Glass is eliminating the need for paperwork for delivery verification, by equipping its drivers with mobile RFID interrogators that read passive EPC Gen 2 ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags on the products being delivered, and then forward that information to Apple iPads.

Zonar Systems has added fuel as an additional dimension to its suite of tools for electronic fleet inspection, tracking and operations management. Up to now, Zonar's vehicle telematics platforms have utilized four dimensions - latitude, longitude, time and odometer - of global positioning system (GPS) reporting.