At the end of any quarter, the last thing CFOs want to hear is that more than half of forecasted sales did not close. Unfortunately, this scenario is quite common. CFOs blame sales staffs for faulty forecasts, while sales teams try to shift the blame to IT for not giving them the right tools to turn fuzzy forecasts into actionable data.
A mere 19 percent of users are "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their current solution for sales force automation (SFA) analytics and more than four-fifths must augment the built-in analytic capabilities with additional tools to address their analytic needs, according to a survey conducted for Birst Inc., provider of business analytics.
There has been enough hype about mobile shopping in general and mobile coupons in particular that you could easily be forgiven if you thought coupons and loyalty cards on mobile phones were a done deal, already available and in use today. The elephant in the room is that the bright clean crisp barcode image you see displayed on your smartphone's screen cannot be read by the majority of barcode scanners used in retail today.
Misalignments in the many linkages of the supply chain lead to variability in delivery performance or in demand, says Dale Houle, chief technology officer at AGI-Goldratt Institute. The theory of constraints can help nullify the effects of that variability.
Intelleflex, a provider of on-demand data visibility solutions for supply chains and asset tracking, has rolled out the Intelleflex CMR-6100, a fully integrated cellular-enabled, GPS-equipped, multi-protocol RFID reader with support for the ISO Class 3 battery-assisted passive and EPCglobal C1G2 passive standards. Intelleflex ZEST Data Services, a cloud-based repository for aggregating, warehousing and sharing information across the supply chain, facilitates on-demand access to actionable data for improved supply chain operations to provide a complete picture of data spanning the entire supply chain.
Project planning can be incredibly time-consuming and tedious, but it's worth it to keep a project running smoothly. A critical piece of the plan is creating your team. This task becomes easier when you know exactly who is available - with the skill sets you need - and what their schedules will be for the duration of the project.
Most companies go through some form of portfolio planning, whether they use that term or not, says Eric Symon, principal with Digital Tempus. He defines it as a strategic effort to determine "what products you're going to sell to whom, and what businesses you're going to invest in." The model can help businesses to understand which products are growing in demand, and which need to be phased out.
When did the supply chain become so complex? Just looking at the typical procurement department, for example, we see that the straightforward RFP, with cost as the deciding factor, is reaching near-extinction.
The Healthcare Plastics Recycling Council (HPRC) appointed Kaiser Permanente and Stanford University Medical Center to its Healthcare Facility Advisory Board to help the council set priorities and steer the agenda towards its mission of inspiring and enabling sustainable, cost-effective recycling solutions for plastic products and materials used in the delivery of healthcare.
It turns out that small- and medium-sized brick and mortar companies can use analytical tools just as the largest corporations can-or the hottest Web-based social media start-ups or the biggest intelligence agencies with three-letter names.
