From one end of the supply chain to the other, processes that spent centuries focused on hardware are now underpinned by the exponentially growing capabilities of software. Because a given piece of hardware only ever needed to be good at its own job, industrial software solutions rose from the optimization of specific functions. Over time, the pieces were rounded together until they created solutions that encompassed an entire warehouse, or enterprise. Even amid the information revolution of recent decades, the industry remained comfortable with a handful of broad software solutions adept at managing individual nodes of a supply chain. Each node had a list of software suppliers with expertise in one area or another, and connectivity between the solutions was often difficult and expensive.
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