A Look at Speech IVR
IVR is catching on because consumers are finally becoming comfortable with the technology of talking to computers....
WERC Study: Getting a read on RFID
According to a recent study by the Warehousing and Education Research Council (WERC), nearly half of responding companies (44%) are not considering RFID technology at present....
Ten Steps to Slashing DC Costs
Distribution center managers are always looking for new ways to cut costs and improve performance. But simple solutions are not always obvious, so we've listed a few tricks of the trade. Deploying just one of the changes listed below, you could save thousands of dollars a year....
8 Ways to Combat Shrinking Labor Availability
The benefits of a booming economy are obvious to top line sales but a robust economy causes problems with labor availability in many markets....
Running Out of Room?
A growing company running an undersize, suboptimal warehouse needs to embrace growth and resist the temptation to simply throw labor at the problem. There are already a plethora of pressures being put on the warehouse by the on-demand environment that has facilitated SKU proliferation, value-added services, and more customization. On the flip side, the procurement department is buying in bulk for cost savings, creating rising congestion, inefficiencies, and safety issues. As a result, accuracy and productivity levels decline. In the end, adding labor alone will simply increase labor costs and congestion with little to no productivity increases....
Are Backorders Sabotaging Your Bottom Line?
Backorders are the bane of many an inventory manager’s existence. Effective inventory management is finding the delicate balance between backorders and overstocks that maximizes service and minimizes costs. Backorders are often preferred to overstocks because the associated costs are relatively invisible. Nonetheless, backorders have their costs. They erode profits and growth by increasing operating expense and customer attrition....
NCOF Sneak Peak: The Mirror Doesn't Lie
One of the biggest mistakes companies make when purchasing technology, equipment, or services is not fully understanding their needs. Frank McCabe, director of business development for Beacon Systems, a Tewksbury, MA-based material handling integrator, says companies invariably jump in the deep end of the pool without having all the facts. He’ll address this common mistake in “The Mirror Doesn’t Lie: An Action Plan for Business Process Improvement,” his session at this year's National Conference on Operations & Fulfillment (NCOF), to be held April 10-12 in Disney's Coronado Springs Resort in Orlando, FL....
Using Logistics to Win in a Multichannel Retail World: Transportation and Logistics Solutions
Determining how a company is going to transport product through the supply chain from the source to the customer is a complex challenge. It is more crucial than in the past, due to global sourcing and the multichannel nature of business. A multichannel merchant not only has to track inbound goods from offshore and domestic vendor, but it also has to handle outbound small-package delivery, often using zone skipping and vendor drop-shipping; replenish stores; cross-dock store receipts and in the warehouse to fill catalog and Web backorders; transport, consolidate, and process returns regardless of the channel where the customer purchased the product; and provide warehouse-to-warehouse transfers, inter-store transfers, and retail sends directly to the customer and receipt of goods at the warehouse closest to the vendor....
Best Practices in Centralizing Transportation
Supply chain and transportation executives are under newly intensified pressure to keep transportation costs down in the face of rate increases and to keep service levels up in the face of capacity constraints. ...
The Challenges of Purchasing Pallet Racks
This week we look at what to consider when buying rack systems....
NCOF Sneak Peak: Calling for Contact Center Research
It's been said that you can't improve something if you can't measure it. For example, most companies talk a good game when it comes to customer service. But among the respondents to the MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT/O&F 2006 Contact Center Benchmark Study, their contact centers are available on average for just 14.5 hours a day. A scant 20% said their contact center is available 24 hours a day. ...
APX'S Garberich: Expansion, Poor Financial Performance the Culprit
Brad Garberich, the CEO of Santa Fe Springs, CA-based APX Logistics, blamed the company’s fast expansion and “poor financial performance” for the parcel consolidator's collapse on March 16 (to read that article, visit MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT.), according to a memo obtained by MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT. ...
APX Logistics to File for Chapter 11
MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT has heard from several sources that Santa Fe Springs, CA-based third-party logistics provider APX Logistics will be filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. ...
A Long, Hard Look at RFID ROI
Today everyone who writes about RFID analyzes the same question: "Where Is the return on investment with RFID?" The answer is quite simple. No technology by itself delivers any ROI without the hard, in-the-trenches work required to discover the specific-to-your-company applications that could be improved and then prioritized based on the amount of business pain they cause. This type of investigation should provide a detailed map that management can use to allocate resources based on the best ROI options. ...
Purchasing Pallet Rack as a Commodity—Part 1
In the 1980s and 1990s, many of the pallet rack manufacturers had large engineering departments to provide application engineering and project engineering for large systems they sold. The application engineers worked with the end users to determine which products best suited their needs and provided the pricing for large systems. Project engineers created the manufacturing bills of materials and the drawings needed for construction permits and installation of the equipment....
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