Often it appears that technology, with all its associated costs and organizational difficulties, has a questionable payoff. In recent years, manufacturers have spent untold billions of dollars on enterprise-resource-planning (ERP) systems, only to get mixed results. Others have installed expensive warehouse-management systems only to have them "blow up" in their faces, causing huge snafus in filling product orders. Still others have purchased expensive supply-chain-management software only to find its integration with the rest of the company and with the systems of suppliers a daunting task. So much for technology's bad and ugly. But many manufacturers have embraced new technologies and experienced the good side: a real business payoff.
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