In , services and technologies are delivered over the Internet in real time. The supporting infrastructure is separate from the customer's IT environment. The customer sends the data it needs to share with partners to the cloud, where partners can access and respond to this data. When cloud-based supply chain management are integrated with ERP systems, buyers and sellers benefit from a robust network that enables more efficient trading relationships and collaboration across a shared community, regardless of which back-end systems a party uses.

* Financials applications. ERP systems excel at managing financial transactions within the organization. But processing an invoice involves collaboration between buyers and sellers. Cloud-based financial solutions can support this multi-enterprise connectivity and collaboration, and allow companies to better manage the electronic settlement process, such as enabling suppliers to convert paper-based purchase orders and invoices into electronic ones, delivering detailed remittance with electronic payment, and enabling dynamic or sliding-scale early payment discounts.

Cloud applications can also drive the kind of collaboration between buyers, suppliers and financial institutions required to better manage payables, days payable outstanding and cash, while providing trade and receivables financing options that ensure their mutual financial health -- a must in today's still-recovering global economy.

* Demand management. ERP systems can connect a buyer to a seller to transmit a purchase order. But they don't connect buyers and sellers. This is being done in the cloud with solutions that allow buyers and sellers to find one another. Much like services such as Match.com, these solutions connect sellers with buyers in active purchasing cycles with specific needs that they can fill. And they deliver results. Buyers and sellers spend less time finding each other and negotiating and making transactions. This lowers overhead for buyers, and increases profits for sellers by an average of 20% to 30% year-over-year.

* Order management. In certain areas, ERP does order management and does it well. In other areas, companies are supplementing their efforts with cloud-based applications. Services procurement like temp labor, for example, involves interactions between the buyer and seller. Such interactions are more suited to cloud-based applications that are shared by electronically connected trading partners and can facilitate the collaboration of a request for candidates, resume submission and proposal, counter-proposal and acceptance.