Plan Now to Enhance Service for the Holidays
No, not St. Patrick’s Day, or even spring break—now is the time for merchants to start gearing up for the end-of-year holiday season, as Debra Ellis of Wilson & Ellis Consulting reminds us. The customer satisfaction index shows no signs of turning up, so every retailer has the responsibility of giving its consumers something to be happy about and reasons to come back this year....
More Growth Seen in Process Automation
Almost in spite of themselves, manufacturers in many industries will be increasing capital expenditures for plant equipment over the next few years, according to a recent study by Dedham, MA-based ARC Advisory Group. The process automation market, according to the study, “Total Automation Business for the Process Industries Worldwide Outlook,” will likely continue to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 5.1% over the next five years, reaching $64 billion in 2008, up from $50 billion in 2003. ...
DMA Publishes Updated Statistical Resources
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) has released two books that are absolutely chock full of facts, figures and information that is essential to plan the future of a direct marketing operation. The DMA 2004 Statistical Fact Book brings together projections, statistics, and trends from over 65 leading research sources. The DMA State of the Catalog/Interactive Industry Report 2004, meanwhile, combines the resources of the DMA and Catalog Age research groups. ...
Distribution Digest Offers Cool Tips and Wonderful Advice
Distribution Digest recently solicited advice from several industry experts on questions involving Pick Area Redesign, Improving Inventory Accuracy, and WMS Implementation Surprises. They compiled these useful tips from Lawrence Dean Shemesh of OPSdesign Consulting, Vinod Chouhan of Iovate Health Sciences International, and Jeff Mueller of Sedlak. ...
2005 Retail Outlook Solid, Not Stellar
The Ernst & Young 2005 Retail and Consumer Products Industry Forecast is out, promising a fairly healthy year for retailers on the one hand, and a certain amount of deflation for manufacturers. Steady but not spectacular growth in the economy—in spite of negative indicators outweighing positives—is likely to translate to a 6.5% increase in retail sales in the United States. ...
Pre-retail Research by Web-savvy Consumers
Retailers, beware—if you are focusing on your customers’ in-store experience and ignoring what they do online, you risk “losing incremental sales opportunities,” according to Joe Pilotta of BIGresearch, which has just completed a survey of retail customer shopping habits. The study findings show that 74% of men and 74% of women now chose to research products online before they actually head for a store to buy anything. ...
Accurate Inventory Maintenance: Tactics That Work
“To have and to hold” is a great romantic sentiment, but it’s the last thing you want to do with your inventory. Ideally, you would move stock so fast that you’d need to keep almost nothing on hand in your distribution center. Since few companies can expect to get anywhere near that blissful state, the next best thing to do is manage inventory so well that you always know exactly what you have and where to find it in the warehouse. AHN Corporation, a warehouse solutions provider, offers proven techniques to dramatically improve inventory control. ...
Strategies to Restore Your Customer’s Trust in E-Commerce
Phishing, hacking, spamming, hijacking—the vocabulary of cyber fraud is expanding by the minute. For customers slammed with online scams of every hue and stripe, the outcome is a loss of trust in Internet commerce, says a thought-provoking new report from Forrester Research Inc. And the distrust affects even people who have shopped on the Internet for years: “A person with a five- to six-year online tenure today has a lower level of confidence in the Internet as a trusted channel than a person with three to four years’ tenure had in 2001,” writes Forrester analyst Jonathan Penn....
Broadband is First Step in Complex Online Shopping Experience
Two recent studies of online shopping behavior provide evidence of the growing complexity evolving around the multi-channel retail experience. The new Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Online Retail service, which tracks online consumer retail activity and purchasing behavior, reveals that broadband consumers make two-thirds of online purchases -- and spend a third more than narrowband-connected consumers in doing so. And a joint study from Fry Inc. and comScore Networks shows that consumers vary widely in their online and offline behavior depending on the product. ...
Brainstorming for Fun and Profit?
If you recognize a need to create a process for innovation within your own company, then Innovation at the Speed of Laughter: 8 Secrets to World Class Idea Generation (Aerialist Press, 2005, ISBN: 0-9762184-0-2, $24.95) may be just the tool you need. Author John Sweeney, owner of the satirical comedy theatre and school for improvisation Brave New Workshop Theatre in Minneapolis, has combined business insights and a passion for improvisation to write a book that shows how to help employees generate ideas, put them through a seven-step “creative funnel” to find the best ideas, build a collaborative structure, and finally result in a marketable product. ...
The Top 10 Supply Chain Improvement Strategies
Changes in the supply chain world occurring too quickly for you? “This path to Supply Chain Excellence will position your organization for success now and into the future,” says Jim Tompkins, president of Tompkins Associates, a Raleigh, NC-based supply chain consulting and material handling integration firm. He’s talking about the Top 10 List of Supply Chain Improvement Strategies, designed to transcend the shifts taking place in technology, channel structures, globalization, sourcing, and customer demands, and help you decide on a clear path to improvement....
Countering Uncertainty With Intelligence is Key to Growth
Nine out of 10 executives from the largest U.S. companies agree on one thing: They need stronger business intelligence capabilities if they are to grow successfully in an uncertain economic and political environment. So says a recent survey conducted on behalf of Accenture by Wirthlin Worldwide. ...
Find a Better Street Corner: Entrepreneurs Turn Out To Be Non-Technical Generalists
As reported recently in the Stanford Knowledgebase newsletter, a 1997 alumni survey of Stanford Graduate School of Business MBA students provides data that indicates entrepreneurs are far more likely to have performed a greater variety of tasks, worked at more different careers, and studied a more broadly based curriculum than their non-entrepreneurial peers. Edward Lazear, who is Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics at the Graduate School of Business, has studied results from the survey of 5,000 alumni and concludes that the appropriate term for the entrepreneurs in the group is “jack of all trades.” ...
Running Out of Time: Ernst & Young Consumer Trends Report
Ernst & Young’s Consumer Trends Center has published its “2005 consumer Trends Report” on the current consumer landscape. According to the report, "mass customization" is just one of several terms essential to understanding the current consumer experience in the United States. ...
Slow But Steady Growth Despite Mixed Signals on Inventories and Industry Production
Despite January production figures that remained unchanged in the face of a forecast 0.4% increase, the overall business production outlook is showing some strength, according to a new report released by ThinkEquity Partners. ...
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