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The article presents information on the JPMorgan Electronic Mortgage System (JEMS), developed and implemented by JPMorgan Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities in New York City in 2000. The company decided to develop the JEMS to provide access to data and forms on the company intranet. The first version was introduced in 1999 primarily as an origination system. Once the system was rolled out, it quickly became apparent that more could be achieved. The JEMS integrated the handling of mortgage information from sales through closing. Because of such integration, JPMorgan was able to handle 20% more loans per year without increasing head count.

The article focuses on the use of SAP solution by international explosives company Dyno Nobel in supporting key business processes, in 2005. The solution provides service to 1,300 company users worldwide from Dyno Nobel's SAP Customer Care Centre facility in its North American business unit offices in Salt Lake City, Utah. The company decided to replace its eight-year-old Unix servers with the SAP solution, as well as electronic business applications that let customers manage their own accounts and automatically convert customer-generated files into sales orders.

The article discusses the role of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in transforming the distribution and tracking of goods in the supply chain. Responding to concerns that terrorists could use cargo containers, in early 2002 the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) trade group launched the Secure Trade in the APEC Region program. In a demonstration project, RFID sensor seals, known as e-seals, were applied to conventional bolt locks on shipping container in Thailand. The containers were tracked throughout their routes using a real-time, Web-enabled software application. In the U.S., RFID is being propelled along the behest of two irresistible forces, the U.S. Department of Defense and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Both are mandating that major suppliers comply with various requirements for tagging and tracking goods by 2005. A similar efforts is underway in Europe under the mandate of the German retailing company Metro Group. In the summer of 2004, the department is racing to complete a final policy for the use of passive RFID and electronic product code (EPC) compliant tags. A defense federal acquisition regulation rule governing materials purchased by the department will cover the application of passive RFID to the case, pallet and the unique identification of items at the packaging level, and will apply to solicitations issued after October 1 with delivery dates on or after January 1, 2005. Wal-Mart has a January 2005 target for its top 100 suppliers to place RFID tags on cases and pallets destined for Wal-Mart and Sam's Club locations in the Dallas/Forth Worth metropolitan area. In April 2004, eight product manufacturers began testing EPC at select Wal-Mart Supercenters and one regional distribution center.

Thomson Financial Inc. introduced Thomson One Analytics, an integrated, web-based research and analytical workflow application incorporating the premier content of Thomson brands such as First Call, Datastream, I/B/E/S and Carson, plus content from third parties and customers' own data in early 2003. While it was integrating disparate financial information products into one unified Thomson One application the company was also scaling up to reach many more users. Thomson Financial turned to Unisys Corp. to deliver the Enterprise Blueprint for Microsoft Systems Architecture (MSA). The goal is to give customers the efficiency of centralized environments with the greater flexibility and cost-effectiveness of Windows. At the heart of Thomson One Analytics are two Unisys ES7000 Windows-based servers, each supporting 16 Intel Xeon Processor and sharing an EMC Corp. Symmetrix storage system. EMC is also one of the industry partners working with Unisys on the Enterprise Blueprint concept. Enterprise Blueprint for MSA incorporates technical roadmaps, best practices, services and technologies that bring mainframe-class performance and availability to a Windows-based infrastructure.