Archive for August, 2008
Contemplating A Water Bottle
On vacation last week, I was sitting on the shoreline of Maine, kind of daydreaming and drinking a bottle of water. I noticed that the Poland Spring bottle seemed somehow different. It was thinner plastic, and had a few more ridges to hold on to it with. On the label I found:
Eco-Shape Bottle
Poland Spring
Our bottle [...]
How Are You Spending Your IT Dollar?
Even in today’s tough business climate, we still see companies making investments in IT systems, especially in the e-commerce area. In many direct businesses, more than 50% of sales are e-commerce based, though those sales may have been spurred by receipt of a catalog.
Long before the current economic slowdown, many companies had become more conservative [...]
How Well Are You Managing Your Inventory?
Inventory is most likely the largest balance sheet asset in your company. How well you plan, purchase, and manage your inventory largely determines your level of customer service and profits.But selling goods in multiple channels means dealing with channel-specific planning and inventory needs.
Based on our consulting work with clients and observations from conducting the F. [...]
Balancing Your Budget and Investment: When is the Right Time to Outsource?
Many multichannel merchants focus on how they can lower operating costs when they consider outsourcing certain tasks. But when you outsource operations, you also outsource the investment. Sounds obvious, but maybe the magnitude isn’t all that clear until you’re faced with replacing an order-management system, moving into a new fulfillment space or upgrading your website.
When [...]
How You Treat Customer Returns May Determine Whether Your Customer Returns
With a soft economy, many retailers are trying to significantly reduce returns in order to boost profits. Some companies are putting more restrictions and conditions on returns. Frankly, I think this will cause further erosion of sales. Who wants to buy a product that can’t be returned, or that carries so [...]
10 Tips to Manage Labor More Effectively in Your DC
Most fulfillment processes are largely manual in nature; only the very largest companies can justify advanced automation. When you look at the total cost of back end order fulfillment—as we did by studying our proprietary F. Curtis Barry & Company Benchmarking ShareGroup data—you’ll find that out of costs that include direct [...]
Controlling and Reducing Your Fulfillment Costs
We all know we’re in a tough business climate. With many companies coming out of less than perfect fall and holiday seasons, there is an urgent need to increase productivity and reduce costs without having to make major capital purchases to do so. Here are five major areas and 25 ways to [...]
How To Avoid IT Project Waste
Management often bemoans the fact that IT projects fail to be delivered on time and within budget. And the truth is, the IT spending waste that occurs in our industry is at times mind-boggling. At F. Curtis Barry & Company, we currently have four clients -ranging in size from $7 million to [...]
Trumpet Your Green Efforts
Do your customers know what you’re doing for the environment? A few weeks ago we wrote about how floored many of us who attended the ACMA Forum in Washington, D.C. were when we realized how little we had done to communicate our efforts. The message came to us from none other than the Postmaster General [...]
