By accessing your suppliers’ stock levels, lead times, order status and other information as if it were your own, you can better manage warehouse inventories or production schedules; and therefore provide a more reliable service to your customers. Being able to make, track and settle orders online will further increase your responsiveness to your marketplace.

Allowing your customers access to similar information and services from your organisation will bring more realistic and timely orders, that your customers know already you will be able to fulfil. Integrating your customers will also enable a much more intelligent analysis of your product line: spot an under-performing product before it impacts your bottom line; increase marketing budget for a product that has potential to go through roof or implement an on-demand (or as near as possible) production process to minimise your exposure through stock levels.

This is not a task to be undertaken lightly, as technical issues involved with integrating different systems that have been implemented by companies in your supply chain are less than trivial. On other hand, trying to persuade same companies to switch from their existing systems to a common platform is likely to be next to impossible. This is where good middleware will come to your rescue.

Why is all this relevant to SME’s? The SME sector is quickly becoming more reliant on technology, and problem of integration has started to filter down to them. Many SME’s are using a few incompatible applications to automate their processes; and have no idea how much integration could benefit them.

So what should I do? If you have only just started, or still have relatively little reliance on your IT systems, a data warehouse style approach may be most applicable. This can work well from a clean slate, although there are some caveats: Bear in mind that to gain cost-efficiency, you must remain locked in to one software vendor, or your integration costs will far outweigh potential gains. This carries with it a certain amount of risk in case vendor withdraws support or even goes bust.

For most SME’s a middle-of-the-road approach is preferable: continue using standard off-the-shelf software such as Microsoft Excel, Access, ACT, Sage etc to store and process information; but use customised middleware on top. This will not only save effort and ensure consistency; it can also be used for reporting, or can incorporate newer, more demanding applications such as predictive software.

It has to be said that designers seems to have struggled getting a phone into a games machine (or a phone into a games console.) Having to turn device on it's side to make a call is unique to say least, but this is probably a small issue, if you can play Tomb Raider while you are waiting for that call.

The second potential Killer App is wireless connectivity built into device. The ability to compete against other N-Gagers over Bluetooth, so avoiding paying connection charges puts N-Gage ahead of competition. Other consoles have Bluetooth add-ons in development or are being developed to include wireless connectivity, Zodiac being a case in point. Nokia have advantage of being first into market. Whether this lead time will be enough to make N-Gage a market leader is yet to be seen. It should give developers time to work on new games and maybe give Nokia a foot hold in market.

Read more about new N-Gage at http://www.mobile-phone-games-world.co.uk/mobile-phones/Nokia-N-Gage/3