As he recognized that the success of supply chain was increasingly dependent on system integration, data integrity, and other key aspects typically run by the IT department, he determined that tight integration between IT and supply chain was a must.

FORBES: CIO-plus Series: Interview with Children's Healthcare of Atlanta CIO and Chief Supply Chain Officer, Praveen Chopra

"We are now starting to work on the integration of this data fusion system into a mobile telephone, " said researcher Enrique Marti.

BBC: Spanish scientists develop more accurate sat-nav system

Cascalog uses the capabilities for data processing created by the Cascading system, which has APIs for scheduling, processing, and integration.

FORBES: Why Adopting the Declarative Programming Practices Will Improve Your Return from Technology

But Mr Lee and his colleagues are already concentrating on the ultimate prize of supply-chain integration: ways of constantly monitoring and improving the whole system by using all the available data.

ECONOMIST: Chain reaction

Issues to consider include ease of deployment, managing backup and data access, support, security, network complexity, device management, operating system diversity, total cost of ownership and integration of various tablet platforms at the application, mobile device management process and system level.

FORBES: Written by Mitch Cline