Thinking of Relocating Your DC? Consider These 5 Factors
Is your distribution center cramped? Or do you think you might save substantially on your outbound shipping costs by moving into a DC? A warehouse relocation may be just the thing for you. But before you go breaking ground or signing lease papers there are factors worthy of consideration: inbound transportation costs; labor cost, availability and peak staffing needs; facilities costs; state and local government incentives; and risk evaluation to your business. Marketers must evaluate all these factors to see how they impact the total savings or costs for the potential move....
DMA Escalates War of Words with UPS
As the postal reform issue comes down to its waning days in the 109th Congress, the war of words between the Direct Marketing Association and the United Parcel Service grew more heated on Sept. 29, with DMA president/CEO John Greco Jr. issuing a pointed statement: ...
Broder Bros. Buys $40 Million Distributor
Imprintable sportswear distributor Broder Bros. announced Thursday it acquired “substantially” all the assets of Amtex Imports...
Working for Scale
It is a long-held belief among warehousing professionals that highly automated distribution centers are more challenging to modify in response to changes...
Coping with Change
The more things change, the more they remain the same, as the saying goes. And that's what most employees expect of corporate change initiatives. Employees...
2006 Benchmark Report on Information Technology
Here's an encouraging statistic from Multichannel Merchant's 2006 Information Technology Systems Benchmark Report: More than 70% of respondents said that...
Q&A with Chuck Mathe: Getting Down to Business
As the vice president of logistics for Milwaukee-based multititle business mailer K+K America, Chuck Mathe oversees four distribution centers: In addition...
Coping with the Seasonal Crunch
By now, many of you are beginning to get the first waves of holiday orders. Are you as well prepared as you think you are? It's not too late to make a...
A Look at Integrated Retail Systems
As a major component of the multichannel world, retail operations are a prime candidate for integration with the direct (contact center and e-commerce)...
Seven Tips for Shopping for a Shipping Consolidator
Direct marketers have long relied on shipping consolidators to help them get their packages farther down in the U.S. Postal Service mail stream so that...
Potential Pitfalls in Gathering Labor Management Data
Early awareness of problems can often save appreciable cost and reduce wasted time when gathering data for your labor management program. Here are nine potential pitfalls to watch out for....
Securing Global Supply Chains: Seven Reasons Why "Getting It Done" Is So Hard
We all know that a company's global supply chain is a potent strategic weapon, economically speaking. Unfortunately, it can also be a potentially fatal area of vulnerability. Consider the hundreds of millions of shipping containers that move among the world's seaports--about 80% of the world's cargo, which adds up to 5.8 billion tons per year--and you can see that there is a lot of room for error. ...
Call Center Certification: What Really Makes Sense
Call centers have come a long way in the past five years in terms of elevating the role and stature of their operations. One contributing factor is the move to provide certification programs that can designate an individual or center as meeting a specific set of standards or having defined skills and knowledge. While some of these are only meaningful within the context of a single employer, there are others that are intended to make certification transportable so that hiring managers and potential clients can use such certifications in their recruiting strategies. ...
Improve Your Self-Service with a Great User Interface
No call center manager wants to be named the next poster child for the “worst self-service” ever. But you need automation to handle growing call volumes and to provide 24-hour access to information and services. The key to success is a great voice user interface. These best practices in voice user interface (VUI) design will eliminate much of what makes the VUI development process seem scary and difficult. ...
Supervisory Advisory
How do most people learn to supervise? They repeat some version of what they saw an early boss, or teacher, or parent, or older sibling do. More often than you’d think, this sort of patterning can lead to domineering, inflexible, unsympathetic behavior -- counterproductive behavior that seems supremely geared to reducing subordinates’ passionate participation. At worst, this kind of behavior can force thinking, feeling employees right out the door, or at the least, may leave them floating in some organizational purgatory to experience a numbed, drained, embittered half-life....
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. ...
Front End Also Presents Challenges with In-Store Pickup
Implementing a “buy online/pick up in store” capability entails more than efficiently transferring the order from the warehouse to the store. Communicating effectively with the customer ...
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. ...
The Case for Third-Party Manifesting Software
Manifesting software is becoming more sophisticated with each passing year. The software pinpoints the most cost-effective carrier for each package, based...
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