Scheduling staff for your customer contact center is much more than simply plugging your customer service representatives’ names into time slots for each day of the week. It’s an infinitely complex task. You have to factor in days off, vacations, skill sets, seniority, and individual availability against the needs of the entire center, call volumes, and fluctuations in volume based on catalog mailings, TV ads, and special promotions. Scheduling all these variables manually can take days – and can leave supervisory staff little time for other important tasks.
When it comes to information technology, what are catalog companies spending and why? On average, IT costs typically represent 1.80 to 2.2 percent of net sales for catalogs, according to new industry benchmarks revealed by F. Curtis Barry & Co.
Whether your company is in need of a commercially packaged warehouse management system, point of sales system, inventory control system, direct-to-customer order management system – or some combination of the aforementioned, the selection of the right system is a major undertaking for your business. No matter what type of new system you’re considering, that purchase is going to be a long-term investment. It has significant ramifications for how you serve your customers, the productivity of your personnel, and the management information it can provide to help you grow your business.
Whether you’re in need of new fulfillment software or a system for your call center, you’ll likely have a choice to make between a packaged software system and custom-created solutions that you develop in-house, with or without expert help.
Cataloging in the United States has reached a level of maturity that places it on equal footing with other channels of communication and distribution. No longer dominated by entrepreneurs and small to medium-sized companies whose primary concern was just scrambling to get orders out the door in a timely fashion, catalogs – and catalog fulfillment – mean big business.
Flexibility with inventory is key to maximizing sales in today’s economy, but a variety of challenges prevent multichannel businesses with direct fulfillment centers and retail stores from maximizing the inventory they have. For instance, e-commerce, catalog and retail have different planning methods, and different accuracy issues; it’s one thing to get the size distribution right for a region and store, and another to plan for the way colors sell. Many e-commerce sites will not take an order if the fulfillment center is out of stock or on back order, giving customers the erroneous impression that the item isn’t available from your company—even though it may be available in stores. And even if it is available, it may not be in a store nearby. If you’re a retail company, you don’t want inventory riding around on trucks between stores or back to the fulfillment center to fill direct orders. At the same time, if you’re a store manager, you don’t want direct orders to strip your inventory of best selling items if you don’t get credit for the sale. All the channels—retail, web, catalog or wholesale—compete for best sellers.
The Increased Importance of Transportation and Logistics Management in Improving Multichannel Companies’ Profitability and Supply Chain Efficiency
We all know we’re in a tough business climate. With many companies coming out of less than perfect fall and holiday seasons, there is an urgent need to increase productivity and reduce costs without having to make major capital purchases to do so. Here are five major areas and 25 ways to reduce your cost per order, increase capacity without expansion, and improve service levels in warehouse and fulfillment.
Although the 2007 holiday season hasn’t ended yet for many multichannel merchants, many of our clients are already preparing for holiday 2008. You should, too, by conducting a post-season audit. This process enables you to challenge your group to find ways to reduce costs and at the same time get critical data and observations to be used for the next holiday season.
In the next few weeks, all the carriers will complete their 2008 pricing announcements. As we look at the future, it’s probably a good bet that these carriers’ rates aren’t going down any more than the cost of oil. So what’s the impact and action plan for your business? Given the size of the increases that have been announced so far, multichannel companies need to look at all the options open to them and develop short and long-term strategies to reduce the impact.
