During the pandemic, we were inundated with news stories about healthcare providers who had to get creative when treating patients because they couldn’t get the necessary medicine, supplies and equipment. Demand outweighed supply. But, for the most part, the supply chain has now stabilised, and nurses and doctors can source what they need to resume treatments and surgeries as normal. So, I was shocked when nearly three-quarters of hospital leaders in the UK and U.S.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in September 2019. It was updated with new insights and perspectives in August 2024. Five years ago, my then-colleague and retail pundit Peter Ward explained why he was such an advocate of self-service technologies at a time when scan-and-go and self-checkout (SCO) were really starting to capture retailers’ attention (and shoppers’ interest) around the world.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of the “SAP Mobile Advisor” series now hosted on Zebra’s Your Edge blog and podcast channels. If you missed the first two posts, you can catch up here and here.

When an ambulance is dispatched to a call, the assumption is that it will be fully stocked with the right equipment and medicines for emergency medical technicians, EMTs for short, to stabilize patients or perform life-saving measures in the field. But with the increased number of calls for service in many parts of the world, it’s becoming more difficult for EMTs to maintain proper stock in their ambulances – and that has patient care implications.

Modern businesses are built on a collection of hardware, software, and services produced by dozens of vendors. The average enterprise uses more than 1,000 applications. The average desktop kit uses over three dozen devices and applications, many made by different companies. And emerging integrated systems rely on myriad technologies in data centers and cloud services. Your business may have even more layers to contend with.

As a retail inventory management professional, you know better than anyone the frustration of out-of-stock items. It’s a problem that impacts everyone: customers leave disappointed, associates struggle to provide a good experience, and stores lose valuable sales. Therefore, addressing out-of-stock issues is essential for maintaining customer loyalty and improving overall store performance. But how? It’s not like you haven’t tried to solve this problem before. No one is ignoring it.

Marketers can’t set a strategy just by looking at sales numbers or economic trends. We must fully understand our audience: what they’re thinking and why, their learning styles, the online places they frequent, and their desired business outcomes. We need to know what matters most and least to them so we don’t add to the digital clutter. That’s not the hardest part of our job, though.

Two years ago, I wrote a Forbes Council article encouraging members to assign more value to software tools. Not just the apps that are on mobile devices and wearables but the software that’s being used to manage those devices and manage overall operations – the software used to make critical business decisions. When I read the article again recently, I realized that this is advice that needs to be resurfaced.