The benefits of automating orders, invoices, and ASNs between your company and its customers are well known. Integrated documents are faster, less prone to error, and improve workflow among your people and systems. At this point, it would be rare to find a major retailer or manufacturer who isn’t using electronic documents to run their businesses. Not so rare, though, are small and medium sized businesses (SMB) still pushing paper. It’s about time for SMBs to make their move, isn’t it?

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I was considering writing an article about which company will be most disruptive to supply chains over the next few years, when lo and behold what pulls into my driveway but an Amazon-branded panel truck delivering a drill I ordered a couple days ago. Is that fate or what? At the very top of my list in the ‘Disrupter Hall of Fame’ would undoubtedly be Amazon, and their recent moves in logistics represent yet another supply chain area that ought to be preparing itself for disruption from this ecommerce giant.

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Yep, it’s that time of year…. time to reflect on how our predictions for 2015 turned out and to look in our crystal ball to guess what may be the compelling stories of 2016. It’s a tough job but somebody’s gotta do it!

2015 was big for supply chains, electronic commerce, and all the technologies ec-bp.com readers follow. Around this time last year, I wrote that we’d see lots of interest in cloud technology, omnichannel consumers, driverless vehicles, robotics, drones, 3D printing and, most importantly, Big Data and IoT. In retrospect, that was like shooting the proverbial fish in a barrel. We indeed witnessed high levels of activity for all those topics, but allow me to make a few quick observations......

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