Why Marketing, Merchandising, Inventory Management Departments Need Business Intelligence Tools
I was sitting in a client meeting for business intelligence tools (BI) and dashboard planning this past week, and the Merchandising, Marketing and Inventory Management people were squaring off over why Merchandising’s results never tie back to Marketing and Inventory Management. Some of it was argumentative, but when you step back and look at it [...]
Achieving a Single Version of the Truth
How many times does this happen in your company? You go to a meeting about sales performance, and Marketing says they think sales are up 3.5%, but the merchants disagree and say sales are up 6.3%. The specific numbers in this example aren’t important; the point is that the two figures aren’t even close. That’s [...]
Published Book – Best Practices in Multichannel Operations & Fulfillment
Best Practices in Multichannel Operations & Fulfillment is still available for purchase on Amazon.com. This guide to multichannel best practices was derived from our years of experience with hundreds of catalog, eCommerce and retail companies. Our team understands the issues and challenges facing multichannel businesses and provides insight on the following topics: Business Management – including [...]
The Art of Order Management System Data Conversion
Q: We are in the process of planning our file conversion as we implement our order management system. Our vendor is telling us that they normally don’t write a file conversion program for most files. What’s your recommendation? A: Today’s comprehensive order management system performs integrated functionality for order entry, customer service, order processing, warehousing, [...]
Learning From History – Leon Gorman on L.L. Bean
Leon Gorman led L.L. Bean from $2.25 million to $1.2 billion from 1967 to 2001. In a keynote speech in Boston several years ago, he recalled the life of his grandfather, Leon Leonwood Bean, who founded the renowned outdoor gear and apparel company. Gorman believes that the company has prospered in large part because it has [...]
Warehouse Capacity Improvement
Probably the most frequent lament heard from our warehouse clients is the “I am running out of space in the warehouse”. Unless you are that rare company that has control over your forecasting and inventory management functions, you have probably said the same thing. The first reaction from the warehouse is that you have too [...]
Measuring Your Employee’s Performance
The following is from a recently received email sent to Curt Barry… Dear Curt – We met briefly at the NCOF conference in Vegas, and I wanted to reach out to you regarding performance errors. I was hoping you could provide me with some insight into how other 3 PL fulfillment companies manage employee errors. [...]
