The demand for vendor-managed inventory programs in warehouses behaves "as a pendulum swinging back and forth between supplier and retailer," says John Mayer, vice president of sales with Park City Group. Over the last six to 12 months, he says, it has swung back in the direction of favoring VMI. Mayer has seen particular interest in the technique in the grocery industry.

CombineNet Inc., a provider of strategic-sourcing systems for global supply chains, has developed new capabilities which allow procurement and sourcing managers to manage electronic sourcing events in a single platform.

Terra Technology has added to its Demand Sensing product suite with the introduction of a Long-Term Demand Sensing (LDS) application.

The electronic industry has always been characterized by high variability in supply and demand. With recent natural disasters such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and flooding in the parts of the U.S., the problem has only become more acute. Tackling it requires state-of-the-art systems, strong management commitment, good customer service, well-run business processes, integration among functions and effective inventory-control procedures, says Dave Lentz, director of innovation and solutions marketing with Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas.

Arena Solutions, a vendor of cloud-based product lifecycle-management (PLM) software for managing bills of materials (BOMs), has forged a partnership with Octopart, a search engine for electronic parts.

Aldata, a provider of business software for retailers, manufacturers and distributors, has created the 2012 version of Aldata Category Optimization.

GT Nexus and Kinaxis have formed a partnership to provide customers with a unified, cloud-based planning and execution platform.