Where does your company stand in the business pecking order? Businesses know their competition within their industry inside and out. They know who they compete with for customers and who they are consistently bidding with or against. An overlooked aspect of business is who the labor competition is or brand competition. Small businesses aren’t just…
HR Departments and Business Growth
Having a structure relevant to your company’s culture is an important requirement to running a healthy business. Putting the correct people and departments in charge of appropriate tasks is a critical decision. Unfortunately, many HR departments have become the owners of job descriptions, workplace setup, technology rules, job interviews, on and on. Departments need to…
Supply Chain Importance
Do you have someone that keeps their finger on every layer of your supply chain? A Chief Supply Chain Officer (CSCO) so to speak. If your business involves moving a product(s) to an end user there should be someone in charge of supply chain health. Ignoring the supply chain is quite possibly the number 1…
Environmental Marketing Gone Crazy
This is a follow up to our LEED posting with an article from Environmental Leader. Apparently Sun Microsystems is of the opinion that “Double Carbon Neutral” companies are on the horizon. Companies so “dedicated” to helping the environment that not only do they completely offset their footprint, but they offset it a second time as…
Strategic Facilities and Operations Assessment
Aging infrastructure and stale business practices can weigh down a company’s operating flexibility. More than just a tactile look at what is going on, a company needs to look at the way they are doing business and validate that the core assumptions they are operating under still apply. A building built in 1920 could be…
Site Selection (How It Should Be Done)
One of the most important decisions that a business needs to make is where they will locate their facilities. Traditional Site Selection firms take a limited cross-section of markets into consideration that varies from industry to industry. Call Centers can only go to these markets, Technology companies can only go to these, and Transportation companies…
What is Knapsack and Why We Use It
Knapsack problems are a type of problem that involves deciding which of a number of items should be placed into a limited amount of space. The problem type gets its name from trying to fill a backpack (knapsack) with items needed to go camping. In the classic scenario the items are a compass, matches, map,…
Knowing Your Audience
An important part of any presentation is knowing who your audience will be. If your pitch is tailored toward finance and you walk into an engineering oriented group you will be in trouble from the start. A little advance scouting goes a long way. Scouting is even more important when the meeting is over the…
E-commerce and the Flexible Supply Chain
Traditional retail models are moving more and more to add an e-commerce aspect to their business models. However, adding this aspect of the business is not as simple as just creating a website and listing all of your products on it. There are a large number of distribution concerns that need to be taken into…
Green Design and LEED
Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) seems to be the coming trend for quite a few businesses. Some companies seem to just be jumping on the bandwagon so they don’t get left behind, some are using it as a marketing play and then some see it as their part toward being environmentally friendly. The…