Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Are You Keeping Up with Your Customers?

As per this recent post over on TechCrunch, Global E-Commerce Revenue To Grow By 19 Percent In 2011 To $680B. That’s right, your customers are embracing e-Commerce in droves. How about you?

How many events are conducted on-line? How many payments are made by ACH, p-Card, or wire? Be honest. While you might still need the physical meetings, you don’t need the paper — and that includes the cheque. So if you are still doing things the old-fashioned way, maybe its time to finally break down and buy an eSourcing and eProcurement suite? Your suppliers, and the trees, will thank you.

It’s Darwin Day!

Darwin Day is a global celebration of science and reason held on or around Feb. 12, the birthday anniversary of evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin, who is best known for the classic work On the Origin of Species in which he proposed natural selection, the basis of the modern evolutionary synthesis.

Darwin Day should not be confused with the Darwin Awards which salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who
accidentally remove themselves from it that are currently open for voting. (And while they do little to advance the state of science education, they are, in their own way, so sad that you have to laugh so you don’t cry.)

Deferred Spending Isn’t A Recovery

A recent article over on CNNMoney.com on Made in America. Staying in America. reported that a turnaround in the U.S. economy is contributing to the solid fourth quarter profits reported by manufacturers that have been staying afloat by making a killing by selling industrial goods to customers in emerging markets.

As the CEO of Eaton said, people that deferred maintenance eventually have to buy new products. And people who prolonged a product’s life with maintenance eventually have to buy new products. And after two or three years of deferred spending, no matter what efforts are made to keep old machinery working, it’s going to start to break and the organizations are going to have to replace it. This doesn’t mean that there’s a recovery in the works or that demand is going to skyrocket, and acting like this is the case will only lead to the appearance of the bullwhip effect in your forecasting. And that’s not good for anyone.

The economy will recover, but it’s going to be a slow-and-steady recovery this time. Not only is the North America is tired of the boom-and-bust cycle of the past decade, but the jobless recovery and continuing mortgage crisis is going to ensure that it will be a while before exuberance returns to the market. So take it slow. Your supply chain will thank you.