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 [...]
Exploring Third Party Logistics Call Centers To Reduce Costs
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 continues, you need to explore whether third party logistics call centers is the right solution for your business. Does it make sense to outsource some or all call center and data entry functions [...]
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 [...]
Company-wide Input for Selecting Order Management System
Here’s the picture: A multichannel company with sales of $20 million has an aging order management system that has been in place for over 20 years. While there are some things that the users like about the order management system, they have basically outgrown it. They need far better marketing information, e-commerce site to business [...]
10 Critical Mistakes in Selecting an Order Management System
Recently, I had a call from a multichannel company about why their order management system selection process had failed. In their case, they signed the order management system vendor agreements prematurely only to find out that the bid was incomplete. There weren’t any estimates for modifications, interfaces, conversion and training. As a result they had [...]
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 [...]
