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 10 Ways to Improve Vendor Quality Control
By: By Curt Barry
If you want to improve your vendor quality control without having to dive headlong into a new way of doing business, take heart. There is an option that relies on the basics of upholding merchandise quality. These ten strategies can improve your vendor quality control program or help you design such a program if you do not have one in place today....
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Identifying Challenges and Opportunities
By: By Sam Flanders
If you are like most distribution center managers, you know that your existing operation has a number of unsolved challenges and problems that your people grapple with on a daily, weekly, and seasonal basis. ...
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15 Areas Ripe for Cost-Cutting
By: By Curt Barry
If you’re like many of your colleagues, you’ve been asked to reduce operations costs or increase your department’s productivity and efficiency. Here are 15 areas to look at in the contact center and the distribution center:...
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Survey: WMS' Underutilized
A recent Supply Chain Consortium benchmarking and best practices survey of 100 top retail and related companies from Raleigh, NC-based consultancy Tompkins Associates reveals that too many organizations underutilize their warehouse management system (WMS) investment or do not make sound upgrade and replacement decisions.
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Protect Your Product: The art and science of void fill
By: By William R. Armstrong
Interior protective packaging helps products survive shipment from their point of manufacture to their ultimate point of use, we generally consider that these protective materials or systems will be designed to perform one or more of the following functions: cushioning, surface protection and void fill. ...
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The Varying Impact of Rate Increases
By: By Dave Roy
Each winter, the big three parcel carriers—United Parcel Service, FedEx, and DHL—announce an average transportation charge increase of 2% to 6% for the coming year. The net impact of these increases to your parcel expenditure may vary widely within this range, depending on a variety of factors. ...
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The Skinny on Small-Item Sorters
By: By Sam Flanders
A small item sorter can dramatically increase your pick rates by allowing you to select requirements for many orders all at the same time....
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10 Steps to Smoother System Selection and Implementation
By: By Curt Barry
Systems selection and implementation is serious business, and no one wants to make an already complex process more difficult or more costly. Over the years, we've determined some principles to follow during an implementation project that will significantly improve the chances of success for all parties concerned. ...
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Merchant Service Processing: What You Must Know!
By: By Ross Federgreen
Most merchants need to accept credit cards in one form or another to survive in the current payment environment. Here are some tips to achieve the best merchant service relationship possible. ...
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Training Champions
By: By Michael Droske
One of the most difficult jobs in the world today is that of a front-line supervisor. Front-line supervisors face considerable challenges each and every day—identifying and resolving critical business issues as well as tackling difficult human resource issues....
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Three Solutions to Help You Think Vertically
By: By Sam Flanders
If your warehouse is out of space for your smaller items, such as parts, vendor boxes, and totes, here are three relatively inexpensive vertical storage solutions. ...
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Getting Ready for Post-Holiday Returns
By: By Will Taylor
If you’re a fourth-quarter business, you’ve no doubt already inspected your warehouse systems, double-checked demand forecasts, stocked your shelves, reevaluate labor processes to optimize order fulfillment. But in addition to preparing for the holiday season’s spike in output, you also have to get ready for the inevitable return of products....
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Buy Smart and Avoid Excess Inventory
By: By Dan Kaplan
Many companies are surprised when they find excess stock of fast moving items during a physical inventory. After getting over the initial surprise, they shrug their shoulders and say: “these are fast-moving items and they should sell.” What they fail to realize is that even though fast-moving items will sell, they carry unnecessary storage costs that affect their bottom line profit. ...
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The Ins and Outs of World Class Order Selection
By: By Sam Flanders
You don't always have to spend a lot of money on a new piece of automaton or software to save significantly in your order selection operation. In fact, many costly systems rely on one or more of the very same process changes we'll discuss here. By deploying one or more of these ideas, you can sometimes dramatically increase your labor efficiency (by 50% or more) and do it without any substantial risk or expense....
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Lost Shipment Recovery: Reward Outweighs the Effort
By: By Nate Lemar and Jeff Jolin
For every shipper, staying in control of lost merchandise is vital. Packages sent but never delivered are costly—not just in strict financial terms, but also with respect to maintaining customer satisfaction. Because the process for claiming missing packages can be cumbersome, monitoring carrier inefficiencies often result in lost leverage and the waste of valuable dollars for shippers. But by using an external service for Lost Shipment Recovery (LSR), clients can see that the reward for keeping a closer watch on lost merchandise far exceeds the effort....
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Moving Toward the Talking Tag
By: By Tom Kerr, Elise Yoder, and Larry Sweeney
You can’t pick up a supply chain journal today without reading about the monumental productivity advances promised by RFID. By allowing complete and accurate life cycle-tracking of a product, analysts claim that RFID will create faster shipments, fewer errors, and cost savings that more than justify the expense of these systems. ...
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Getting Out of the Phone Loop
By: By Laurie Brown
In a marketplace with so many choices, it is essential for you to do everything possible to make it easy for your customers to do business with you. Any difficulty or obstacle that hinders or frustrates them may make them run away from you without you ever having a chance to “make things right.” So what can you do to encourage your customers to remain your customers and not drive them to your competitor?...
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Marketing from the Back-end
By: By Debra Ellis
Reducing fulfillment costs becomes the driving force in many companies. Unfortunately, this creates a dichotomy. On one side, costs are reduced, increasing short-term profitability. The other side is a reduction of service that alienates customers. It reduces growth and long-term profitability. The challenge is to find a balance between service and expense....
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Examining the Realities: An Analysis of Today’s Call Center Metrics
By: By Brian Galvin
Contact centers are data-rich environments, with detailed information available from a multitude of systems on every minute step of each interaction’s progress. In fact, the vast quantity of available data is one of the industry’s key challenges, since it is often quite difficult to link the various data elements together to get a coherent picture of how well centers are being managed. ...
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UPS' Eskew Letter: Don't Blame Us
In a letter obtained by the O+F Advisor, United Parcel Service (UPS) chairman/CEO Michael L. Eskew says his organization is being incorrectly depicted as the villain in the postal reform issue. ...
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WERC Salary Survey: VP Logistics is Tops
If you're a vice president of logistics, chances are you're walking around with a few more dollars in your pocket than your counterparts, at least according to 2006 Warehousing Sales and Wages guide from the Warehousing and Education Research Council. ...
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President Signs SAFE bill into Law
As expected, President Bush signed the Security and Accountability for Every Port Act (SAFE) into law on Oct. 13. Congress passed the legislation on Sept. 30, by a vote of 409 to 2 in the House of Representatives. In May, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to pass H.R. 4954, the Security and Accountability for Every Port Act. ...
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