In less than 20 years, Uniqlo has become the leading fast-fashion retailer in Japan and a strong player in other Asian countries like China, Korea and Taiwan. Since 1998, the company has expanded sales at double-digit rates, thanks to an aggressive pricing policy combined with a high level of quality, a mix that proved hard to resist for Asian customers. Key to Uniqlo's strategy and success was an agile supply chain inspired by the "fast-fashion" model pioneered by Inditex and also utilized by H&M, the two largest fashion retailers in the world. While Uniqlo demanded competitive prices from its suppliers, it also offered them continual technical assistance in developing and perfecting their manufacturing techniques, and supported them with a high flow of orders. Nineteen ninety-eight was an important year for Uniqlo, as the opening of a flagship store in one of the hottest fashion districts of Tokyo projected the brand in Japan at a national level. At the product level, a partnership with Toray, one of the world's leading producers of composite and synthetic fibers, resulted in garments that had performance and properties no natural material could match. Working with Toray forced Uniqlo to refine its supply chain further, that became "just-in-time," mimicking that of other highly competitive Japanese companies. With an efficient but regional supply chain, Uniqlo faced rising manufacturing costs in China and was experimenting with new supply chain models in low-cost locations like Bangladesh. Uniqlo's supply chain had proved effective in the Asia Pacific region, but could the same model be scaled worldwide? Was the low growth rate Uniqlo experienced in the US, and particularly Europe, also due to the limitations of its current supply chain?

Citibank reshaped considerably its e-business program after the financial crisis of 2008 focusing on leveraging its geographical reach, rolling out global initiatives to maintain its leadership in treasury and trade services, and becoming even more customer-centric. Citi restructured its R&D centers and its marketing strategy to assist customers in finding solutions rather than selling products. Citi's execution was fast-paced, but the landscape for treasury and trade services was changing rapidly after the financial crisis. Multi-banking became a must and a new solution marketed by SWIFT allowed to multi-bank on the internet at low cost and with greater efficiency than previous solutions. While adoption was slow, the change in the competitive landscape was significant. The data of any bank could now be seen and manipulated through the internet portal of any other bank. Internet portals continued to evolve offering new features and functionalities at product level: Citi updated its CitiDirect BE and TreasuryVision platforms to offer what the market asked for. But seamless bank-corporate integration at technology level was not evolving at the same pace. Corporation and bank data exchanges were inefficient, making a number of treasury tasks labor-intensive. Corporations came to prefer multi-banking platforms after the financial crisis, and were demanding automated integration of bank data into their ERPs. An e-business transformation was on the way. Internet banking portals became multi-banking portals, as did proprietary bank-corporate EDI links like CitiConnect. But it was cloud computing that promised the definitive technological solution for the bank-corporate integration model. The ERP vendor SAP was the first to experiment with a private cloud model and allow direct straight-through processing of each financial transaction sent from the ERP directly to bank middleware. Citi was the first bank to sign up with the project, but its competitors followed.

T Nexus was incorporated in 2000 and in 2013 became a leader in cloud-based supply-chain management solutions. Born as a technology platform dedicated to the shipping industry and in particular to facilitating supply-chain management for major international carriers, in 2002 GT Nexus became in an SaaS (software as a service) provider, integrating analytics software on its platform. The Global Trade Platform introduced by GT Nexus was a major innovation in the shipping industry: it offered a standardized interface to shippers seeking to book cargo space with major carriers and allowed carriers to manage a far larger customer volume. Over time, the GTN platform became a non-industry specific supply-chain solution, used by some of the largest MNCs (multi-national corporations). GT Nexus expanded its product offering and platform, designing its own software solutions, such as the Trade Solution platform for financing, by partnering with other software companies, such as MicroStrategy and Flagship Custom Service, or by directly acquiring competitors, in the case of Metaship AG in Europe. A final merger with TradeCard in 2013 made GT Nexus the market leader in cloud-based supply-chain management software with over US$100 billion of international trade transactions managed on the platform. After the merger with TradeCard, GT Nexus offered a complete procure-to-pay solution on the cloud, covering every aspect of supply-chain management. The company experienced brisk growth as a pioneer of cloud-computing technology applied to supply chains.