American Eagle Outfitters operates several distribution centers in North America, including a facility in Warrendale, PA, and a DC in Mississauga, Ontario, to service its Canadian stores. But the multichannel apparel merchant is most excited about its newest DC in Ottawa, KS, which is helping it reduce labor costs.
If you build a company on the basis of service, you can branch into other areas, says Alfred Lin, chief operating officer/chief financial officer of the $850 million shoes merchant Zappos.com.
The holiday order crush
Fueled by the media frenzy about the many product safety problems with imports, 2007 was truly
Software as a service, or SaaS, is arguably the most talked-about trend in IT. Bill McNee, CEO of Westport, CT-based research firm Saugatuck Technology,
If there was technology that could help your sales force better manage contacts, generate higher sales, and close more deals, would you invest in it?
As a multichannel merchant, you have to deal with fraud on many levels, from orders placed with stolen credit cards to employee pilferage in the warehouse.
According to business process advisory firm The Hackett Group, world-class IT executives achieve superior results in part by shifting their spending and staffing priorities away from technology infrastructure and towards application management, software, and other areas. Hackett’s Book of Numbers research, produced as part of its IT Executive Advisory Program, shows world-class IT executives spend $1,686 in total technology infrastructure process costs (labor and outsourcing) per end-user — 23% less than their peers, who spend $2,183 per end user. The lion’s share of the reduction in staffing that world-class organizations see is also concentrated in technology infrastructure, with only 9.2 full-time equivalent staff per 1000 end-users, compared to 21.7 for peer companies — a 58% difference.
RFID has the clear potential to transform the retail supply chain through real-time product tracking and identification and elimination of human error, but the industry is slow to embrace the new possibilities it offers — and technical and human challenges are impeding industry-wide RFID integration. So concludes an international survey conducted by Deloitte and Retail Systems Alert Group. The survey, “RFID: How Far, How Fast: The State of RFID,” provides the most recent snapshot of how 122 retailers, distributors, CPG companies and apparel manufacturers view RFID adoption and innovation in the 2004-2005 timeframe. It also provides initial insight into industry-wide investment and expectations for RFID in the next five years.
Three recent reports from the National Retail Federation (NRF) paint somewhat different views of the retail picture past, present, and future.