b.cognosco
Most Popular
- Historical Yearly Average Gasoline Prices
- Outlook 2003 Message-ID Insanity
- Real-time Sand Animations
- Adobe Acrobat 7
- Adobe Announces Name Change and New Product
- Largest Technology Boondoggle in Public Education History
- Yahoo! Buys del.icio.us
- Skype - Disruptive, Not Compelling
- Aluminum Christmas Tree Museum
- Network Printing Hell and windoze XP
Book Reviews
Recently
Call Centers Represent Upstream Opportunity
Half-terrabyte of Storage for Under $4,500
Tuesday, July 16, 2002
Caution Needed in Fulfillment Services
A recent print industry report touted fulfillment services as the next "killer opportunity" for print service providers. Fulfillment is a legitimate way for digital printers to expand service offerings, but executed poorly -- or with the wrong model -- it can lead to disaster.Caution must be taken not to overlook the actual ROI of most fulfillment operations (low) and the costs of inventory (high). Many fulfillment providers today have built businesses based more on storing things than providing robust services. As the cost of inventory and real estate has risen, they've found themselves pinched between expensive warehouses and customers who no longer want to maintain inventories. Most printers will likley have to make changes in their market and sales strategies for fulfillment to generate significant revenues. And selling print is a far different proposition than selling operational support services.
Fulfillment can be a solid service when matched with other appropriate offerings -- such as sophisticated freight and logistics management -- but printers must be wary of treating it as a simple warehouse adjunct. Instead they must address fulfillment as just one aspect of a demand-driven business and customer model, and build a solid value proposition for these emerging markets.
Fulfillment Services The Next Killer Application for On Demand Printing [WhatTheyThink]
Monday, July 15, 2002
Call Centers Represent Upstream Opportunity
James Robertson of Column Two has published some informative work on call centers over the last couple of days.Call centers are an emerging opportunity for Print Service Providers looking to move into upstream, value-added business. Already, if you call Microsoft's Certification & Training center, your call is answered by a Bertelsmann employee in Burbank, CA. If you call John Deere's dealer support line your call is answered by an employee at Midland Information Resources in Davenport, IA.
These companies handle the printing, inventory, and fulfillment tasks for training or parts manuals. It was a natural extension to begin handling the questions that go along with these products. A call center doesn't have to be a huge enterprise (Midland's has four employees), but running a call center is nothing like the printing business. It requires a whole new set of skills and understanding.
If you're interested in how call center management could fit into your business, or want to better understand the value proposition for such an operation, James' work is a good place to start.
Tog on call centers. Bruce Tognazzini (aka "Tog") has written an excellent piece about How Call Centers can Make or Break Companies. This talks about the value that a call centre call can add to the business as a whole.Interestingly, this is exactly what I wrote yesterday, when finalising the Powerpoint presentation for my talk at IIM 2002 on "Knowledge management for call centres".
For the record, these are the six advanced KM for call centres points at the end of my presentation:
(For more on this topic, see my full article.) [Column Two]
- Building 'communities of practice' within call centres
- Developing relationships between customers and the organisation
- Call centres as a strategic corporate asset
- Call centres as a source of innovation
- Incorporating call centre expertise into research and development teams
- Integrating training, usability testing and knowledge management
Terry Frazier at 12:00 AM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Future of Print, Strategy
Wednesday, July 10, 2002
Half-terrabyte of Storage for Under $4,500
Networkable storage for less than $10 per gig looks like pretty decent answer for big image databases.
IBM plans low-cost storage appliance. NAS 100 with close to half a terabyte of storage will support ATA [InfoWorld: Top News]
Terry Frazier at 12:00 AM
| Permanent Link
| Trackback URL | Categories: Future of Print, Technology
Syndication
Contact
Presence
This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
