Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, presented recently at the Stanford Technology Ventures ProgramSpotlight on Scalability. Her insights into how to make an impact with your business based on scaling key processes, from sales channels, to service, to content delivery, are well worth listening to. Below is a 4 minute video excerpt of a [...]
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
Competitors are often retrenching this time of the year as Europe begins its holiday season and much of the U.S. workforce takes a deep breath before Fall begins, and for many, a new fiscal year. In the midst of a recession that is uneven in impact, there is the tendency of many companies [...]
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
The proliferation of programming languages including AJAX, XML and the resulting growth of Web Services is revolutionizing the development of channel management applications.
With the integration capabilities of AJAX for example, Mash-Ups can quickly be created, integrating two or more data sets to provide a richer client experience than ever before.
Taken together, all of [...]
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
Being able to accurately predict which future products or services a customer is interested in needs to go beyond click stream analysis and concentrate on predictive analytics as well. Here are three of the many strategies that predictive analytics is being used for today.
Predictive Analytics for Cross-Sell and Up-Sell Strategies
From the most [...]
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) are critical for any marketing strategy as they provide the necessary insights and intelligence for continually evaluating, augmenting and improving both online and offline strategies. Over time the results of these strategies, when freely shared with employees, also lead to greater willingness to adapt to the change the [...]
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
The phrase what gets measured gets better certainly applies to managing and fine-tuning multichannel management strategies over time. Even for the most effective multichannel management strategies, there is the need to constantly focus on how to improve customers’ experiences across all of them.
One of my favorite books which I am re-reading this year [...]
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
Getting beyond using analytics applications and dashboards to track sales, doing simple trending analysis, or basically slicing and dicing sales figures and instead measuring profitability is far more important today.
It’s time to get beyond the basics of channel management analytics and concentrate on how to measure profits by channel partner and then build [...]
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
One of the best examples of how critical interdepartmental integration across Operations, Marketing, Finance, supply chains and manufacturing is the quote-to-order process.
This is a specific process that requires intensive coordination between these departments or there are significant losses both in terms of costs but also in terms of customers.
Figure 1: Finding Competitive Advantage [...]
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
The underlying concepts of Demand Driven Supply Networks (DDSN) as defined by AMR Research serve as the foundation for many of the best-performing build-to-order and production configuration strategies in place today. In addition to world-known companies including BMW and Dell continually working to create build-to-order strategies that also give customers accurate estimates as [...]
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
Companies that are going to emerge from this recession the strongest will be those that concentrate on how to create new, innovative strategies that will allow them to become easier to do business with who at the same time stay in step with how fast their customers are changing too. If there is [...]
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
I hate to see people or companies give up.
Where is the passion? Where is the intensity? Where is the mission? The fight? The freedom to run their companies – and their lives – is on the line.
I am seeing way too many people running companies giving up. From the senior management in some [...]
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
The Lean Advanced Initiative at MIT is one of the leading thought leadership organizations in the area of lean manufacturing theories being applied pragmatically to complex system- and process-related problems. In this video Dr. Eric Rebentisch explains results of research completed by the Initiative focused on assisting enterprises with the transition to lean [...]
Louis Columbus
Cincom Systems
Every interaction, every expectation set and fulfilled, every product launched, and every promotional and marketing campaign launched and every build-to-order product created all contribute to a customers’ level of trust with your company. Companies get defined by how they attract, sell and serve customers.
With trust being the most precious commodity there is in [...]
The world’s best manufacturing companies have found that through the integrating of product development, sales and market including channel forecasting, procurement and production that it is possible to have synchronization make a strong contribution throughout their sales, channel and marketing operations.
Taking this a step further, it is also possible to turn this synchronization into a [...]
