During their monthly consulting sessions in the early 1970s, Peter Drucker and Mort Mandel, the then-CEO of electronics and auto-parts distributor Premier Industrial Corp.

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Take Misumi, a Tokyo distributor of factory automation tools and metal molds used for casting parts.

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The U.S. Attorney's Office now blames six ex-Anicom executives for sinking the former Rosemont, Ill. distributor of cable, wire, networking and fiber-optic parts.

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Another important building block of e-commerce infrastructure involves activities described by Web Services Description Language, or WSDL. Oriental Motor, a Japanese distributor of industrial motors, relies on one of these programs to update the inventories and prices of the many parts it offers online.

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