Collaborative software may start life as a brilliant new business idea - but then, as with all brilliant new ideas, it is up to teams of technical boffins to make it work.

Then painstaking research, consultation, investment and testing are necessary before any new system finally becomes operational.

Even then there can be teething problems. Here three men at three separate companies who deal with e-collaboration on a daily basis explain how it affects their working lives

* AAH PHARMACEUTICALS

AAH Pharmaceuticals, based in Coventry, is Britain's leading pharmaceuticals wholesaler and it is beginning to roll out an Eqos-based e-collaboration system that will allow it to share order and delivery information with suppliers and customers, writes Paul Bray.

This cannot come a moment too soon for the company's regional inventory managers, who spend too much of their time chasing suppliers for undelivered orders.

"Before the Eqos system, they would get a list of items that were out of stock and have to chase up the suppliers for each one," says Kevin Parrott, AAH's inventory systems development manager. "Depending on who they spoke to, they might get a different answer, because the manufacturer's customer services staff might not know as much as its production people."

The managers were so busy that they only had time to chase each supplier about once a month.

"It was very frustrating indeed," says Parrott. "By the time they rang the supplier, they would often be told that the item was back in stock and had already been delivered to us."

The new system will change all that. The inventory managers, who travel between AAH's 18 regional depots, will be able to access up-to-date stock information via their laptop computers - either from summaries fed into AAH's core systems, or by looking at the detail in the Eqos system itself.

AAH's customer services staff will also benefit. If there is one thing worse than giving a customer bad news, it is...