Online Strategy: Why E-Commerce Worked Last Year
It’s always good to know just why something happened, because, in theory at least, you can replicate those conditions and expect to end up with the same result. Aided by consumers, online merchants did enough of the right things in 2004 that they ended up with the best sales since the heyday of the dot-com era--$136.6 billion for the year, according to a report from Forrester Research Inc. And here’s why, says Forrester analyst Carrie Johnson:...
Survey Shows Rise in DM Spending -- But Lack of Understanding
A recent survey conducted on both sides of the Atlantic by international database solutions provider Alterian (Bristol, England), shows that while most respondents expect their direct marketing expenditures to increase over the next 12 months, there are real concerns about marketing service providers' ability to understand a client's business. The survey examined attitudes of almost 600 marketers and marketing service providers (MSPs) in both the UK and North American direct marketing industries....
Life is Good at the Top of the Supply Chain
AMR Research has weighed in with a report that names the top 25 companies embracing supply chain best practices and technologies. The AMR Research Supply Chain Top 25 and the New Trillion-Dollar Opportunity identifies Dell Computer as the best, calling its growth of 17% in the PC business on a $40 billion revenue base "phenomenal." Boston-based AMR used financial metrics such as return on assets, inventory turns and trailing 12 months growth, combining those with its analysts' opinion of each company's supply chain performance based on field research and case studies, to arrive at a composite ranking score. Dell's composite score of 20.75 was far ahead of second-place Nokia's 13.31, though the cell phone manufacturer was said to have supply chain best practices that "turn ideas into profitable businesses." Coming in at number three was consumer products powerhouse Procter & Gamble, with IBM fourth and Wal-Mart fifth. ...
Customer Satisfaction Slumps, Time to Make Lemonade
In 1994, the University of Michigan Business School, the American Society for Quality, and the CFI Group teamed to create the American Customer Satisfaction Index to measure the quality of the “household consumption experience.” The news from the national ACSI for Q4 2004 is not happy for retailers: Compared to last year, consumer satisfaction is down in categories across the board in e-commerce (-2.7%) generally, and in subcategories such as retail (-4.8%) and auctions (-1.4%), while retail trade shows an overall decline of –3.2%, with department and discount stores at –2.6% and specialty retail stores with a slight gain, up 1.4% from 2003. But what if you were to make the lemon of customer dissatisfaction into lemonade? Debra Ellis of Wilson Ellis Consulting offers an interpretation of these statistics in her current newsletter, along with a plan for e-commerce companies whose customers may not be as happy this year as they were the year before. ...
Book Review: Strategic Planning and Performance Management
A new book from Elsevier, Strategic Planning and Performance Management (Elsevier, 2005), by Australian Graham Kenny, CEO of consultancy Strategic Factors, posits that successful businesses must view their own performance from the point of view of stakeholders. ...
Spend More, Pay Less: Procurement Technology Streamlines World-Class Ops
What’s the differentiating characteristic that separates world-class procurement operations from their less sizable and comparatively successful competitors? Money spent on technology, according to recent research from business process advisory firm The Hackett Group. ...
Ludwig Offers Tips to Enter "Supercharged Selling State"
George Ludwig, a nationally known keynote speaker, has more than 25 years of sales, sales management, and sales training experience, including five years of presenting his sales success seminar all over the country. As sales trainer, coach, and corporate consultant, Ludwig trains over 10,000 people per year from various corporations and associations. Yet even Ludwig says, "Selling is scary. If you doubt it, you've never stood before a dour-faced prospect, stomach churning and palms sweating, images from recent rejections swirling in your mind like some tornado of self-loathing." Of course, he's not talking about himself; he's talking about you. But in his new book, Power Selling: Seven Strategies for Cracking the Sales Code (Dearborn Trade Publishing, 2004, ISBN: 0-7931-8571-8, $19.95), Ludwig offers some tips to help "Supercharge Your Selling Skills" and overcome the fear that, he says, is all in your mind. ...
Extra! Extra! Innovative eMerchants Focus on Effective Sales Tactics!
Okay, maybe it’s not really breaking news, but it apparently is to some online retailers. Conclusions derived from the e-tailing group’s 7th Annual Mystery Shopping Study revealed that, from a merchandising perspective, the most innovative merchants are focused on tactics to more effectively sell products. And, observed e-tailing group president Lauren Freedman, "Among the 100 sites that we shopped it is becoming a case of the haves and have-nots. While some sites continue to innovate, others show few changes year-to-year. This is cause for concern, as customers will gravitate to those who consistently improve the shopping experience across all channels.” Freedman’s advice: “We encourage merchants to review the findings from this study and prioritize tactics, adding the most relevant merchandising features and functionality to their sites."...
Executives Around the World Look Forward to 2005 Growth
The London office of the Economist Intelligence Unit has issued a "CEO Briefing" that indicates a widely hopeful attitude toward the possibilities for growth in 2005, with 88% of the companies surveyed predicting growth of some sort over the next three years. Improved customer service, cost efficiency, and innovation are credited for the positive outlook. In fact, 34% of respondents expect robust growth. ...
Companies Ill Prepared to Make Sourcing Shift to China, India, Survey Finds
Management consulting firm A.T. Kearney has released its study "2004 Assessment of Excellence in Procurement," which tabulates results from procurement and supply chain executives in 275 companies across 25 industries. Overall results show that the trend toward a rising level of sourcing from "low-cost" countries has continued for the last ten years, and respondents to the study indicate that this trend will probably continue for several more years into the future....
Nine Unconventional Ways to Manage Inventory
Like us, you’re probably sick of the terms “optimization,” “synchronization,” “collaboration,” and other staples of the corporate lexicon. Unfortunately, you’ll encounter those buzzwords over and over if you read—as we did—the research firm Aberdeen Group Inc.’s “Supply Chain Inventory Strategies Benchmark Report” all the way through. To spare you having to do that (and prevent you from overlooking what we must concede are the report’s many useful “takeaways,” to use another business cliché), we have extracted the important inventory management tactics you need to know....
Warehousing Strategies: What's Trendy This Year
The year is still young enough that everyone’s preoccupied with 2004 wrap-ups and what the stars portend for 2005. If you’ve begun to revamp your distribution facility—stop! Take a moment to bone up on the latest warehousing and logistics trends. The following predictions come from the logistics professionals who constitute the board of directors of the Warehousing Education and Research Council:...
AMR Research Outlines Key Retail Decisions
Three reports recently released by Boston-based AMR Research address the emerging retail trends of 2005, as well as process and technology decisions that retailers will need to make to support their businesses. Collectively titled Decisions 2005, the reports cover store operations, demand intelligence, retail planning, RFID, retail supply chain, pricing and promotion management. According to Scott Langdoc, AMR's VP of Research, "Key challenges for the industry include: mega-retailer dominance, the blurring of segments and channels, the effects of increasing online sales on brick-and-mortar retailers, the shifting focus of customer loyalty toward low cost, compliance driven visibility and controls issues, as well as increasing IT costs." AMR suggests these top priority decisions: ...
Rapid Growth Makes HRO an SRO Act
What’s new in outsourcing? If you don’t quite recognize the letters HRO, you will soon—it’s about to be everywhere, according to the Outsource Institute. The International Association for Human Resource Management (IHRIM) is featuring an entire track devoted to human resource outsourcing at its conference and exposition this year in Reno, NV. Attendance at last year’s HRO World conference was up 25% over the previous year’s inaugural show. IT outsourcing giant EDS has just signed a collaborative, 10-year agreement with human resources consulting firm Towers Perrin, positioning the new entity to handle 33 million HR plan participants in a field already crowded with competitors such as Accenture, Wipro, Tata, Infosys Technologies Ltd., IBM Global Services, and Hewlett-Packard. ...
Retailers' 2005 Focus: Supply Chain Efficiency, Says Study
How to get closer to the customer? Increase supply chain efficiency, say retailers -- and that's what many will focus on this year, according to a new study. "Retail Horizons: Benchmarks for 2004, Forecasts for 2005," reveals that the majority of retailers cite supply chain optimization as a priority initiative for getting closer to the customer. This third annual study by the NRF Foundation, the research and education arm of the National Retail Federation, and BearingPoint Inc., a business consulting, systems integration and managed services firm based in McLean, VA, surveyed more than 300 retailers from a wide assortment of department, specialty, apparel, grocery, and home center stores. ...
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