However, if you connect your inventory system to your accounting system, it gets more interesting. Now, whenever you buy or sell something, the implications for your inventory and your cash flow can be tracked in one step. If you go further, and connect your warehouse management system, customer ordering system, supplier ordering systems, and your shipping company, suddenly that inventory management system is worth a lot. You can do end-to-end management of your business while dealing with each transaction only once, instead of once for every system it affects. That's a lot less work—and a lot less opportunity for errors.

These connections can be made easily using Web services. Web services allow the applications to share information through the Internet, regardless of the operating system or back-end software that the application is using.