If your business is a distribution center, much of what you do ultimately ends up in your shipping area to be sent out to your customers. Many distribution centers primarily use either UPS or Federal Express to ship their packages. You have probably seen the commercials from USPS showing how easy and inexpensive it is to send items via USPS priority flat rate. It has been my experience that if you have small, heavy items, USPS is the way to go, because you ca get a lot of weight into a smaller box; and with USPS it doesn’t matter how much it weighs, just as long as it fits into the box. If you are shipping lighter and larger items, it probably still makes sense to continue to use your current shipping service.
Some distribution software has the ability to integrate with shipping software, such as the software that UPS and FedEx offer to businesses. Make sure your software has the ability to integrate with USPS services so that you can take advantage of the low cost flat rate shipping through USPS.
Image by http://www.prestonlee.com/archives/67 via CrunchBase
Being in the Marketing profession, I follow many notable marketing professionals through books, blogs, or websites. One of them that I follow is Seth Godin. In one of his recent blogs, rather than some new idea or thought for the day, he had a free ebook that can be downloaded in PDF format. Seth has compiled written stories from authors who see the “big picture” into this wonderful ebook. It has more than 80 pages, but is a quick read; and a worthwhile read. In Seth’s Blog, he says:
Now more than ever, we need to shake things up.
Now, more than ever, we need a different way of thinking, a useful way to focus and the energy to turn the game around. I hope a new ebook I’ve organized will get you started on that path. It took months, but I think you will find it worth the effort.
Yesterday, the web giant, Google, had the misfortune of their Gmail (Google’s online email service) servers going down for approximately two hours. Evidently, they had taken down a small percentage of their servers for routine maintenance, but the demand on the rest of the servers was too great, shutting down the service for a small subset of its approximately 149 million users.
I bring this up as a thought, as many business applications are moving to the web, rather than the traditional approach of having the business applications on the desktop or centralized server within the company. Cloud computing is a trend that is increasing in popularity, but it hasn’t necessarily been perfected yet. You will need to weigh your options and risks before making a decision. If things go awry, how accessible is your data?
You have most likely been to a seminar of some sort, where you go to learn something new or or find out about the latest offering from some organization. You go to a conference room at a hotel, or maybe it’s a multiple day conference with several seminars sprinkled in the agenda.
Once you get there, you step into a large room with several people there. At the front of the room is someone putting the final connections together from their laptop to the projector which is sitting in front of a large movie screen along the front wall. As the time for the seminar approaches, the presenter will talk while using PowerPoint slides to highlight important points, or perhaps showing a website, or at least something visual.
At this point, you have already spent at least 1/2 to 1 hour in travel time. That’s if your lucky enough to be attending a local venue. Perhaps you have spent hours, or even a day, traveling to another distant seminar.
Along comes the webinar. One of the biggest benefits of a webinar is convenience: no travel time, no travel costs.
Webinars are online seminars or meetings. Webinars have a presenter, but everything is seen on your own computer screen via the internet. Audio for a webinar is either by phone or through microphone and/or camera, attached to your computer (also known as voice over internet, or VoIP), along with some speakers for receiving sound. The phone method is the most common for interactive webinars.
Like live seminars, webinars offer interaction between the presenter and the audience. This can be done by typing questions or comments into the “chat” portion of the webinar on your screen (usually a portion of the screen is dedicated to something such as chat and showing the list of attendees), or you may just verbally ask a question like you would in a regular seminar.
As I said earlier, the tool, or service, used for a webinar is also designed for meetings. If you have employees or associates in remote places, nobody has to travel for the meeting. All discussion, presentations, and collaboration can be done via the internet. Control of the session can be shared so that all of those involved in the meeting can show anything from their computer that may be necessary for the meeting.
With the click of a mouse button, you can be on to the rest of your work day, rather than taking the time needed to get back to your office.
Maybe back when your company purchased DistributionPlus software from us, your business ran slightly different. You may have been at a point in time where your business was not using any shipping service with any volume, so you just created the shipping documents and arranged for shipping as needed, and there was no need to add any integration with freight carriers
Since then, you may have reached a point whereby your shipping volume is such that the manual work of handling each shipment as they come takes up far too much time. Because it was not a need at the time that your DistributionPlus software was implemented, you may not even be aware that we have the ability to integrate both UPS and FedEx with DistributionPlus.
When I say that the process is integrated, I mean that the freight software and DistributionPlus “talk” to each other and exchange information. For instance; DistributionPlus can pull the freight charges from the shipping software ( FedEx or UPS software) and place that information in the shipping charges within a sales order, so that the proper shipping gets charged when the sales order is converted to an invoice. The tracking number can also be stored in sales history, saving your employees time when a customer calls in to find out where their order is.
For years, Microsoft has been interested in, and has made attempts, at purchasing Yahoo. Most of what I read explained that Microsoft was after Yahoo’s powerful search engine. When the last offer from Microsoft didn’t go through, Microsoft furthered their development on the own search engine. A few months back Microsoft rebranded their search engine and now call it “Bing”. I must say that Bing is quite impressive, compared to the old “Microsoft Live Search”.
Today it was announced that a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo was agreed upon. Yahoo search will now be powered by Bing. From what I have heard, Yahoo search will still look the same, but it will actually be “Bing search” under the hood.
I bring this up because so many companies are looking for a better online presence for their company listing or company information, whether that be through paid online advertising, pay per click (example: Google AdWords), or achieving higher placement in search engines (aka Search Engine Optimization or SEO). If you are thinking about advertising or pay-per-click, and have thought about doing this with the big 3 search engines (Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google) maybe things will be simpler now that Bing and Yahoo have combined.
As it is listed on the bottom of this web page, we are located at 8628 Eagle Creek Circle, in Savage, MN. If you want to visit us, but first bring up our location on a map, such as Mapquest or Google Maps you won’t find us. You’ll get close, but that doesn’t help. The area is so new that Eagle Creek Circle does not yet exist on any of the mainstream online maps. We are listed on Yahoo Maps, Google Maps, and Microsoft Live (bing) Maps, but the location on the map between those services varies.
I have included a map below with a pushpin that is where our location is. Stop in and see us, we’d love to see you.
We have talked with several companies in the past few months who have gotten themselves in a position whereby they have several kinds of software in order to run their business. We talked to a company that had an ecommerce site, so they had back-office software to process the orders from the site, but in addition, they had software specifically for their accounting, and yet a different software program to track their inventory.
The representative that we talked with from the company was exasperated. Not only is it expensive to run different systems in the same environment but, because the programs do not communicate with each other, a lot of work needs to be done manually. Besides having to perform a lot of procedures manually, they were having lots of errors as a result of programs not talking with each other.
Many companies have come to us with their specialized needs and we have been able to help them satisfy them, while integrating the process into the DistributionPlus software, keeping everything integrated so there aren’t additional manual procedures that need to be done.
The purpose of this blog is to act as a more frequent communications method than the CP Tech Times newsletter. This blog is not designed to replace the newsletter, but to act as a communications tool in between newsletters.
This blog will contain information on technology, information and updates on DistributionPlus software, thoughts and news regarding small business, and other items that may prove to be beneficial for your company.
We encourage you to add your own comments into the blog as you see fit. This may lead to some good discussions on certain subjects.
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