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 much [...]
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. Currently, we [...]
Retail Pro, Page-Digital File for Bankruptcy Update
It has been brought to my attention that there are a few inaccuracies in our original blog on this subject that I would like to amend/correct as follows:
Retail Pro product sales have not in fact been declining over the past several years, nor have their annual maintenance renewals. Further review of the of the documents [...]
Marketing, Merchandising, Inventory Control: Gaining a Single Version of the Truth
I was sitting in a client meeting for business intelligence (BI) and dashboard planning this past week, and the Merchandising, Marketing and Inventory Control people were squaring off over why Merchandising’s results never tie back to Marketing and Inventory Control. Some of it was argumentative, but when you step back and look at it objectively, [...]
Top Ways to Cut Costs and Improve Customer Satisfaction
Every smart business manager is constantly looking for ways to reduce costs and make the operation more productive. In today’s challenging economic climate, such efforts become even more crucial. Small steps that can help to save money may make a big difference. Our experience in the fulfillment and call center has been that often the [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
Best Practices in Multichannel Operations & Fulfillment – Our New Book
Best Practices in Multichannel Operations & Fulfillment is now available. This guide to multichannel best practices was derived from our 24 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 “Developing Your Corporate Dashboard [...]
Selecting and Implementing the Right System
During a session I led at last week’s National Conference on Operations & Fulfillment in Orlando, Fla., I identified several critical mistakes businesses make in their systems selection processes, regardless of the type of system. These include distributed control systems, order management systems (OMS), warehouse management systems (WMS), e-commerce or similar ones.
Among the mistakes I [...]
Bringing Order to Order Management
So many changes continually take place with regards to order management systems that it is difficult to keep up with them unless you’re doing it full time. So many choices: Sigma Micro announcing plans for Software as a Service and acquiring 3rd party fulfillment provider Stark Bros.; Avexxis offering an “off the shelf” version that [...]
