Warehouse and Labor Management Systems: Performance Appraisal and Metrics
Labor management programs provide work measurement and quality control data to enable you to identify employees with unacceptable performance. You can review each week’s results and identify employees whose performance is below acceptable goals. ...
Flight Simulators for Contact Centers
Recently I asked several contact center managers, "How prepared are your agents to handle the job immediately following initial training?” The answers ranged from “barely” to “more than 60%.” Many managers said there was no way to prepare them adequately: Agents simply have to get on the phone and experience what it is like. ...
Four Steps to Internal Benchmarking
Benchmarking is the process of drawing meaningful comparisons between a company’s performance and the performance of identified best practices. For many companies, these known best practices can become a beacon for continuous improvement, pointing employees to better ways to get things done. ...
The Skinny on “Amputated” Coaching
You may already know where your coaching gaps are in the contact center. If you don’t, there’s a good chance they are either between performance feedback and educating or between educating and modeling, since these are the most commonly recognized gaps in contact centers. We call these gaps stage-one and stage-two amputations. ...
Quick Tip: Little Touches Can Yield Big Gains in Customer Service
Customer service can be a differentiator to your customers. At the same time, even relatively minor details can make a major difference....
Separate but Equal: Warehouse and Labor Management Systems
Recent advances in warehouse management systems (WMS) and time and attendance (T&A) systems provide many benefits in inventory control, distribution operations, and personnel administration. They also provide an opportunity to obtain files that you can use to comply with certain labor management requirements. But though labor management is a key means of cutting costs and improving service, it is usually given a low priority during implementation of WMS and T&A systems. ...
The Ins and Outs of Conveyor-Based Zone Picking
Conveyor-based zone picking can dramatically improve operational performance in certain situations. It works by separating an order into two or more distinct picking zones and having the conveyor control system determine what zones the order needs to visit. It is most often used with a shipping carton or tote, traveling on a conveyor system. ...
WMS by the Numbers
Warehouses are built around numbers —the facility’s square footage, how many rows of racking it takes to stock the number of SKUs, the amount of orders processed through a facility in a day. In their marketing materials, warehouse management system (WMS) providers discuss all sorts of numbers. But there are other numbers that you won’t see in their marketing brochures or advertisements that you should nonetheless keep in mind before buying and implementing a system. ...
Are You Outsourcing?
The debate over international outsourcing is passionate. With protectionists and free trade advocates drawing battle lines. Isn’t ironic that neither side ever mentions domestic outsourcing to customers? Since the 1970s, when consumers gladly pumped their own gas to save a few pennies, companies have been outsourcing service positions to their customers. The proliferation of e-commerce has contributed to a significant reduction of service positions in established corporations. ...
Freight Consolidation and Zone Skipping – Putting Control In The Right Hands
With fuel prices and interest rates on the rise, multichannel merchants are taking a closer look at how to cut total costs of goods by driving down per unit transportation costs. ...
Customize Dashboards for Individual Needs
You should create multiple "dashboards" in your facility, signs or screens each customized with metrics and information for a particular audience. Senior management will be most interested in getting a view of how the entire facility is doing....
Nordstrom To Expand Cedar Rapids DC
Seattle-based cataloger/retailer Nordstrom said on Aug. 29, it plans to expand its Cedar Rapids, IA-based fulfillment and contact centers. The expansion will coincide with the company's updating of its direct business' inventory systems. ...
IT Budgets to Grow Over Security Concerns
Marketers are expected to show IT budget and capital expenditure growth in 2006, according to the third annual Retail IT Budgeting Study conducted by the National Retail Federation and AMR Research. ...
M&A: Contact Center Deal Tops Teleservices
Quadrangle Group and Thomas H. Lee Partners' $3.3 billion joint buyout of West Corp. (at nine times earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) was the largest teleservices transaction during the second quarter of 2006 and accounted for 68% of the sector's transaction value during the period, according to New York-based investment bank Petsky Prunier, which tracks merger and acquisition activity for marketers as well as market service firms. ...
Ecometry, GERS Merge
Delray Beach, FL-based software solutions provider Ecometry on Aug. 21 merged with San Diego-based GERS Retail Systems to form Escalate Retail, a $100 million company with about 400 employees and 650 clients. ...
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