Does Your Order Management System Need To Be Replaced?
Coming out of 2009 there seems to be some positive momentum from this past holiday season with a 2.9% increase over 2008; some of our clients experienced results above their 2009 plan. Because of the tough economic times over the last couple of years; most companies have not invested heavily in the infrastructure of their [...]
Healthcare Projects on the Rise
Over the past few months, we have noticed a new trend occurring in the type of clients contacting us about our warehousing and fulfillment consulting services. We typically consult to Business to Consumer (catalog, Retail, E-Commerce), or Business to Business companies. More recently, in addition to completing a fulfillment assignment for one of the largest [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Last Month’s NRF Show
F. Curtis Barry & Company showed attendees its operational assessment capabilities, including consultation on warehouse management, call-center and order-management systems and freight-rate analysis and contract negotiations. The company also shared with attendees a new book by its founder and president, Curt Barry, “Best Practices in Multichannel Operations and Fulfillment,” which Jeff Barry said is a [...]
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. [...]
What’s Happened to Gross Margin From Imports?
This is a question that needs to be asked because of some recent trends. Consider:
1. Production chases low cost labor. Where Japan and Taiwan were the centers before China, production is starting to move from China to other Asian countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam and Cambodia as well as Mexico, Central and [...]
