How does BellSouth do it? With 100 data variables on each of its 1.2 million small-business customers, it would be impractical to do on-the-fly data mining each time the phone rings. Instead, strategists create a model of that customer's risk of switching. Offers based on that analysis appear automatically on the rep's PC screen as an incoming caller is identified. "They're getting a recommendation from the system based on a whole bunch of analysis that's happened even before the customer has called in," Barnes says. In other words, the immediacy of the offer belies the great deal of advance planning that went into making it.

Amberwood Homes, a home builder, has cut an average of three weeks from the five months it typically takes to complete a 3,000-square-foot house by using a new real-time application from AirToolz Software. The construction company's superintendents file progress reports from building sites via handheld devices, which update a master schedule that's accessible online to plumbers, roofers, and other subcontractors. Savings come from lower finance costs, because houses are completed more quickly, with fewer "trip charges" by tradesmen who would otherwise show up as scheduled only to be told to come back another day because progress was slower than expected.

"It's become very evident the building process is getting done quicker," says Dan Johnson, Amberwood Homes' construction manager. "It's going to make any home builder more cost-efficient."

Business successes like these have helped make the U.S. economy, as hobbled as it is, more resilient, says Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan. "Economic imbalances in recent years apparently have been addressed more expeditiously and effectively than in the past, aided importantly by the more widespread availability and intensive use of real-time information," he said in a speech last month.

Greenspan will be happy to know there's more where that came from, as companies of all sizes increasingly devote resources to the goal of becoming real-time businesses. In late July, Ford Motor Co. and Caterpillar Inc. disclosed a partnership with SAP to develop supply-chain software designed to get parts to market more quickly and provide real-time visibility into inventory and the status of customer orders. Under the arrangement, SAP will add planning and sourcing functionality for spare parts to its supply-chain management applications. The spruced-up software then will be integrated with SAP's customer-relationship management applications so Caterpillar, Ford, and their dealers can improve customer service while lowering parts-handling costs.

Supply chains are a hot spot of activity because, as Bob Betts, SAP's senior VP of global supply-chain management, notes, businesses are "not even close" to squeezing excess time from their supply-chain processes. "There are massive productivity gains yet to be achieved," he says.

Metro AG, a conglomerate that is Germany's largest retailer, is working with SAP and Intel to develop "adaptive" supply-chain software that tracks the movement of goods in real time from factories to warehouses to stores. The approach combines radio-frequency identification and software agents with SAP's supply-chain management applications. As parts, boxes, and pallets move from place to place, radio-frequency ID tags communicate their whereabouts to the software agents, giving businesses precise information, rather than approximations.

Common characteristics of adaptive supply chains, Betts says, are the ability to plan, take action, "sense" the status of goods, and automatically respond to events. The concept can and should extend to partners and customers. "It does you no good if you're the only one who knows," Betts says. "The ability to communicate and collaborate is key."

ZipRealty Inc. has put that thinking into practice. The online real-estate company takes Multiple Listing Service information from 26 sources and makes it available to people shopping for homes in 13 metropolitan areas. The data is timely -- as many as 350,000 listings are updated during a typical day -- and it's available directly to consumers. ZipRealty's agents also keep track of client activity through the same system, which combines DataMirror and Oracle software on Sun Microsystems servers.