Archive for February, 2009
Selecting the Right Software Vendor For Your Business
Selecting software, be it an Order Management System (OMS), Warehouse Management System (WMS), Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERP), E-Commerce solution, or some other system, is a challenging task. The process normally begins by documenting a set of requirements, constructing a Request For Proposal (RFP), identifying vendors, viewing web demos, and conducting site visits and reference [...]
How to Select the Right Front- and Back-End Systems for 3rd Party Fulfillment
More and more companies today are outsourcing fulfillment to avoid making investments in that non-core area, or in the technology necessary for it. We’ve also seen hundreds of start-up e-commerce companies that simply don’t want to be in the fulfillment business. All of these companies are turning to third-party fulfillment (3PF) providers like you. With [...]
How Business Intelligence Systems Make Executive Dashboards, KPI Alerts and Analysis a Reality Across Your Enterprise’s Systems
As companies grow in size and complexity, providing actionable, analytical information to senior management has become increasingly difficult. No one system provides more than 10% of the data senior management needs. Key data such as plans and history often exist in spreadsheets outside the information systems. Systems such as the telephone phone switches (ACD) have [...]
Free shipping strategies: Merchants weigh in
Multichannel marketers consider their free shipping offers to be highly strategic and competitive. So when operations consultancy F. Curtis Barry & Company interviewed dozens of direct merchants about their free shipping strategies used this past fall/holiday 2008, few wanted to be quoted directly.
But catalogers and Web retailers have plenty to say on the hot topic [...]
7 Tips for Understanding the Total Cost of Ownership When Acquiring Applications
Recently cited information from the technology firm CNET reveals that roughly 49 percent of IT projects suffer from budget overruns, and 47 percent suffer higher than expected maintenance costs. It’s imperative that companies identify and properly plan for all expenses associated with replacing a business application to avoid these costly mistakes. Here are seven ways [...]
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 $650 million in sales—all [...]
Outsourcing to Save Call Center Costs
Having managed a call center, I have always been a proponent of in-house call centers, but times are tough and they are changing. Every company today is looking for ways to save money without hurting sales and customer service. As the pressure on businesses to dramatically reduce costs intensifies, you need to look at domestic [...]
Free Shipping: A Database Marketing Perspective
Virtually every bit of advertising and promotional material produced by multichannel companies during the holiday season has contained a common phrase: FREE SHIPPING. In preparation for an article that will appear in the February issue of Multichannel Merchant, we tracked hundreds of promotions that arrived in our postal and e-mail mailboxes from August through December, [...]
2008 Holiday Sales for Direct and Retail
Like many of you, we’ve spent the past month talking with our clients about the results of Fall/Holiday 2008. Here is what we are hearing, along with what our clients think the outlook for 2009 is and some things you can do immediately to further reduce expenses.
Holiday sales for retail and direct industries. After all [...]
How Will You Provide Your CEO’s Favorite Reports?
You have just spent four months doing your homework to replace your aging call center and order management system: gathering user requirements, writing an RFP, getting capable vendors to bid on it, conducting demos and selecting the finalist. Yet there is one more activity that, if not done superbly, will shake management’s confidence that replacement [...]
