Anti Counterfeiting: Protection from Fraudsters and Grey Marketers

Globalization has paved way for the wide expanse of the business into areas beyond geographical boundaries and technological innovations have helped business houses and corporate sectors make their presence felt on the World Wide Web. These enterprises and large business houses are also faced with challenges of theft, piracy and grey market activity.


The grey market activity being a major threat with abilities to shake up an organizations bottom line, the product managers and executives need to work out anti-counterfeiting measures to combat this and many more threats arising from counterfeiting issues. These threats not just affect the revenue generation system but also corrode the company’s market share and brand reputation. The worst effected ones by these are the pharmaceutical industries and the technology giants. The World Health Organization reports a minimum of 10% of drugs supply being counterfeit, with the higher level going beyond 50% and involves branded, generic and over-the counter medicines.


As for the IT industry, the proliferation of counterfeits is mostly through unauthorized channels opened as a result of outsourcing and globalization. Reports that have poured in show the semi-conductor industries losses amounting to billion dollars every year as a result of illegal sales. But these are just related to reported facts. Most cases go unreported too. Even as the FBI termed product counterfeiting as the crime of the century, the fraudsters through grey market sales and counterfeit products earn revenue returns amounting to 600 billion dollars.


The first step towards brand protection actions is to understand the level of damage done by the grey markets to the manufacturer as well as to the retailer. The grey market products are acquired from the unauthorized dealers of authorized channels and are sold at higher discounts, thus affecting the authorized sales revenue. To combat these, organizations can invest in good online fraud protection solutions. These enterprise anti counterfeiting solutions, a software-as-a service offered by the leaders in industry besides providing an end-to-end brand protection will also provide a round the clock real-time monitoring of the sources which will help to list out violators and take necessary action against them.


Another industry where the anti-counterfeiting solutions need to be implemented is the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical counterfeiting affects not just the manufacturers but also the consumers and the government. With the help of pharmaceutical anti-counterfeiting, manufacturers can get a clear view of the worldwide market in a real-time format. This helps the government to find violators, stop counterfeiting actions and recover lost revenues.

Functions of Reverse Logistics Systems

We all are aware that logistics is a part of supply chain management system. Where as logistics entails the forward movement of goods within a supply chain, reverse logistics on the other hand can manage the reverse management of products. In other terms, it refers to returns management within supply chain function. Reverse flow is an essential as the forward movement of the supply chain. By estimating a consumer supply chain process flow, you can arrive at the conclusion that reverse flows are crucial within a supply in order to recover the product expense comprehensively.

 

Reverse logistics also takes into consideration the moving of goods from one point to the other. The difference likes in the fact that it shifts from the point of consumption to the point of origin. The process of Reverse Logistics is defined as “The process of planning, implementing, and controlling the efficient, cost effective flow of raw materials, in-process inventory, finished goods and related information from the point of consumption to the point of origin for the purpose of recapturing value or proper disposal” by the Reverse Logistics Executive Council.

 

The two essential aspects of the retail industry today are retail distribution and retail packaging. Keeping this in mind efficient revere logistics solutions enables the retailers to remarket comprehensive systems, attain full or partial recycling, and modifying the old assets into valuable investments. Today eminent service providers of reverse logistics offer a complete package in logistics solutions that are customized to cater to the modern day requirements. With these solutions you are able to spot outdated revisions and constituents instantly, save the expense of warehousing stock that is decayed and remain compliant.

 

Innovative integrate reverse logistics management system efficiently renovates a wide selection of goods within a less time and gets them back into operation, after being tested according to certain standards. Reverse logistics services offered by popular service providers include the following:-

 

  • RMA Support

  • Warranty Returns

  • Lease Returns

  • Refurbishment

  • Test and Debug

  • Repackaging

  • Fulfillment Solutions

  • Disposal (remarketing, recycling)

  • Web Based Inquiry and Reporting

 

Finally, reverse logistics helps us product recycling to be able to recapture the value of the product and its disposal. All returns are not required to be financial write offs. Some can be renovated, modified and resold. In some situations, a part of the good too can be remanufactured or recycled. This apart, reverse logistics also plays an integral part in some enterprises in asset disposition to safeguard the environment and recover the information from IT hardware for averting data thefts.

Protect Yourself from Counterfeits and Gray Market

Did you know that almost every 7 seconds a victim falls prey to online fraud? Even the most prepared organizations find themselves falling prey to these attacks. To safeguard your business you need to establish some basic fraud prevention measures to stay secure online as well. Online fraudsters today have become increasingly sophisticated and operate through customized shopping sites. This is a growing concern for the e-tailers as it can harm their business to a great extent. According to Sage Pay’s E-business Benchmark Report the average cost of fraud each year is £500.  

 

According to Global Anti-Counterfeiting Group, 10% of all IT products contain counterfeits. 7-10% of all goods sold in the world are estimated to be counterfeit or have counterfeit parts. 11% of world’s clothing and footwear are counterfeit. Even the pharmaceutical industry has not been spared. Worldwide Pharmaceutical counterfeit sales are increasing 13% annually- nearly twice the pace of legitimate drugs.


Challenges of Finding Counterfeits Online


Finding counterfeits online is a huge challenge as there are too many web pages to monitor manually. Moreover illegal activities are camouflaged well and hidden to typical web crawling. Another major challenge is analyzing the data fast before it grows cold.


Being Aware of Online Fraud


It is important to be aware of online fraud. Online consumers shop in haste. They are not much aware of the fraudulent activity that goes on online. For instance, normal signs of a safe website, such full contact details, security policy, upgraded goods and securely managed payment pages might be successful in offering reassurance to buyers to browse and purchase from the website. However, the same website might be tricking buyers either with the information they share or by selling duplicate goods. However, today there are numerous ways to prevent internet fraud.


Enterprises today have realized that internet has facilitated selling of counterfeit products and gray market goods to a great extent. This is a very common tactics of selling fraudulent goods in the high tech industry.


In the recent past, there have been instances of global high tech enterprises resorting to online fraud protection solutions that were manual or semi-automated and were time consuming. These solutions were rarely able to curtail fraud as counterfeit listings often go on and off the web within 48 hours, thus a solution that can offer real-time searching to find violators has to be used. These solutions offer not only unmatched visibility into global open market to search for counterfeits but also a number of automated enforcement features including cease & desist or DMCA letters, Vero and other auction shutdowns .

Eminent service providers of online fraud protection have come up with innovative solutions to protect the same. They have inherent features such as:-


* Improved anti-counterfeiting software solution

* Innovative search capacities that scans the internet on a regular basis

* Application of human intelligence to assure data integrity

* Prioritizing for suspects based in the client specifications

 

Thus stop online frauds by being proactive rather than reactive and invest in a fraud prevention solution that can help you can curtail this problem.


Read Also On: Grey Market

Important Aspects of Retail Packaging

Today retail packaging has gained far greater significance than it was a decade ago. With business environment becoming hypercompetitive and with different brands vying for customer attention, packaging has become an important aspect of selling. Hence, the onus is upon the product manufacturers to come up with not only quality products but also smart packaging solutions.

 

In the retail industry, the sale of any product depends largely on the presentation of a product. No customer would buy a badly presented product that fails to attract his or her attention even if it is a quality product.Thus, packaging plays a very crucial role in products finding their way from the shelves to the baskets of the customers. Companies spend billions of dollars on advertisements and other marketing campaigns and even succeed in gaining consumer attention but once inside the shop it is not the advertisements but the packaging that acts as the final trigger.

 

Today’ consumers are time pressured and therefore do not have time to pick and choose. As they navigate through the store, with hundreds of products staring at them waiting to be picked, their attention falls only onthose products that provide a clear picture as to its use and benefits in a split second. Branding helps companies to carve a distinctive identity of their own; this in turn helps customers to distinguish them from their competitors. Similarly, distinctive and unique packaging helps manufacturers to make their products stand out from the rest.

 

Thus, presentation is just one aspect of retail packaging. Similarly, several other aspects are there that the product manufacturers need to be concerned about. The following are some of the important aspects of retail packaging.

 

Protection

The contents in the package should be protected from temperature, compression, vibration, shock, moisture, water and so on.

 

Barrier Protection

When packing food items, oxygen absorbers are placed to prolong the shelf life of food. However, oxygen absorbers can work effectively only if the packaging is done perfectly. The packaging should be such that it provides effective barrier from water vapor, oxygen, dust and so on.

 

Modified Atmosphere Packaging

In the case of fruits, vegetables, meat, meat products, and seafood, the fresh state needs to be extended. In such cases, the packaging should be such that it delays the natural deterioration of the product. Hence, the food products need to be packed using technologies such as gas flushing and compensated vacuum.

 

In today’s highly competitive market environment, organizations find themselves torn between meeting deadlines and other business activities. And this affects other important activities such as packaging products for retail distribution. Hence, companies must seek the help of custom retail packaging service providers that provide services such as packaging products to custom label printing, source tagging to bar coding.

 

Learn more about :- reverse logistics & Order Fulfillment


Retain Employees with Employee Benefit Services

Conventionally speaking, employee benefits were considered as an essential and a moral responsibility of a reliable employer. This is what was portrayed by the altruistic approach of the Quaker owned enterprises back in the 19th century. However, in the recent years employers have modified their look and approach towards issues pertaining to the same.

 

Mulling on employee benefit services pragmatically, the act of offering a wide range of benefits as a start up enterprise or evaluating and amending the present offering given to the employees for set businesses, requires quite a few careful considerations. It is essential primarily that as an employer you ask yourself about the main aim behind offering these benefits. Once you do, analyze your answers and assess if they fall in the clauses mentioned below. It is to:-

 

* Be able to recruit people of a certain caliber that you seek

* Retain the best employees in your enterprise

* Retain a competitive advantage over other peer groups

* To boost the moral of the employees

* To encourage and motivate the employees

* Or most importantly a combination of all these clauses


These clauses are nothing less than business goals. Once you have arrived at them you need to think for yourself if your employee benefit services allow you to attain all your goals successfully.


Today there is a shift that has taken place concerning a “total reward” outlook within the employers to provide employee benefits that addresses work ethics and employee lifestyle. Than being of a complete monetary value these benefits are given to employees motivating them and are translated in the form of child-care vouchers, flexi-time, cycle-to-work schemes, on-site nurseries and many others.


However, there are eminent service providers that help companies to provide voluntary employee benefit services to their employees. Benefit schemes such as Parking and Transportation, Home/Auto Insurance and Voluntary Group Term Life Insurance are a selected few that has gained prominence amongst employees. Services and payroll deducting reporting offered by these service providers makes the programs to be with premium payments via the payroll deductions easy for the employer to execute them without incurring any extra overhead to the payroll department. Other services offered by these service providers are listed below:-


* Employee Health Care Benefits

* HR Compliance

* Human Resources Solutions

* Human Capital Management

* HR Outsourcing

* Global Compensation

* HIPAA Compliance

* Employee Benefits Consultants

* New Employee On boarding

* Retirement Planning

* Tax Compliance


Employee benefit services are a key to counter HR issues such as absenteeism and high attrition rates. When employees are treated well and they feel a treasured part of an enterprise they become more productive and perform better. This helps in producing a higher work quality. Other complementary employee benefit services that might be useful in maximizing the productivity comprise of mentor programs within an organization, healthcare and wellness programs and education continuing scopes that are significant to an employee’s profile and designation. Any enterprise that takes interest in investing in quality employee benefit services will experience from improved employee services that would in turn increase the overall productivity.

Read Also On: HR Outsourcing, Tax Planning


Use the Software Localization Strategy to Connect with Your Global Customers Quickly and Effectively

People now have greater access to knowledge than ever before, thanks to advanced digital technology. All the information one could possibly need is readily available on multiple websites. While the free exchange of information through chats, blogs and forum discussions makes the process of finding resolutions relatively easy, the inability to provide information in different local languages is a serious shortcoming in the global market.

How can you develop a rapport with your global audience and convey what you want to sell if they cannot understand the language? How can you assess the strengths and weaknesses of your product if you are unable to procure your customers’ feedbacks and suggestions? The feedbacks and suggestions are critical aspects that help you identify the weak areas and make credible improvements to leverage your business to the global standards.

Human translation has been a liability in the past, due to frequent errors causing insurmountable costs. The automated online language translation software provides you relief from many content translation and localizationissues, and helps your business experience optimized results. The software provides time-saving, easy and efficient translation solutions in real-time that help in delivery of prompt services and responses.

The translated content is accurate and relevant which helps in keeping the customers engaged and increasing your chances of earning more profits. It facilitates fluent and meaningful translations of colloquial, grammatically incorrect and unstructured content that is commonly found in the sites. Software localization manifests productive outcomes such as shorter lead times, a terrific quality product that efficiently fulfills the cultural, linguistic and technical requirements through automated solutions.

The software translation technology helps in reducing costs and delivers exemplary services with the help of a streamlined translation management process. It accentuates the integration and collaboration between the translation departments and vendors. It provides you with improved control and higher visibility of the translated content and the costs. The software also facilitates management of the growing content with the help of translation memory solutions. The previously translated content is stored in a multilingual database for future use so that costs can be saved on translation of the same sentences. It also expedites the translation time enabling the multi-language handbooks to be completed at a faster rate.

The software ensures that key phrases, terms and brand names are efficiently captured, controlled and distributed in real-time to maintain a consistent communication with your customers, for protection of trademarks and registered names, and for producing quality content that meets the legal norms and compliance requirements. The translation technology software provides a supremely supportive platform for your business to achieve the most beneficial results possible.

Read Also On: Localization Software

Preparing Competitive Job Submittals with the Resourceful Electrical Estimating Software

The thought of creating job submittals or price estimates for customers unnerves the electrical contractors. That is because they have to waste hours searching for the information on electrical products and prices from manufacturer websites and catalogs. The contractors are aware that they have to prepare a competitive pricing list with the relevant product information to attract the customers. However this mission often fails as the information that is procured is laced with errors due to the data being obsolete. This leads to losses and damage to the reputation of the business. An electrical contractor has to make quick and accurate decisions based on the information that he receives. But how can he overcome the challenges of finding relevant information quickly and easily?

The electrical estimating software can alleviate your concerns by providing you an online database of 2 million electrical parts from more than 650 manufacturers. The software helps you to find the relevant information with accurate prices through easy search options. It helps you to get connected with your choice of suppliers for collecting the prices in real-time and this facilitates you to prepare submittals quickly and easily without any fatal errors.

The software is a handy tool that can be used for electrical contractor bidding purposes. The pages that are provided contain images and illustrations of the products with detailed information. It facilitates you with easy controls for preparing invoices and changing orders. With the help of the estimating software you can submit the list of items to your suppliers which will be matched with their pricing list and the correct price is immediately returned to you without any delays.

The software provides you the facility of cross-referencing for price comparisons and creating estimates. The trade books serve as your guide in the absence of the software to help you prepare job submittals on the spot. It contains 120,000 indexed items that can be searched quickly and cross-referenced along with the prices. You are provided with an updated database containing the latest industry news compiled from different sources. You can easily send and receive data with the help of the software. You can also search for items easily due to the flexible cross-referencing capabilities. You are provided with an electrical pricing catalog with high quality images.

In an age of fast responses your business will suffer losses if you do not have the capability to demonstrate equal or exceedingly superior qualities. The time that you take to create job submittals give an impression of your strengths and weaknesses to your customers. You can beat the competition and advance progressively if you ensure the deployment of competent tools.

Read on - electrical distributor, automotive parts catalog

Social Media Analytics and Online Efficiency

Social media analytics today is considered along the same lines as BI, basic data management and predictive analytics. Social media analytics today is at an evolving stage and yet has advanced a lot. Such is the notion of Jhon Lucker, the leader of leads in Deloitte’s Advanced Analytics and Modeling practice. In his own words social media analytics is “From my perspective it's infantile--the mere fact that you have so many little start-ups, from my point of view, reflects that, many of these startups have good ideas, but their efforts haven't yet coalesced”.

 

The technology that is used for estimating social networks has advanced and applies “big data” analysis procedures. Scientists for estimating audience sentiment regarding a brand and predicting consumer marketing trends and scopes use these techniques. However, the products assist the requirements and are at a beginning stage and the knowledge of putting the information to use is limited.

 

Introduction to Social Media Data

 

Social media data is a new concept. Here people do not monitor on how it gets recorded or set up on the web. A structure needs to impress on it retroactively. In order to keep a count of the number of times an enterprise gets a mention in a social networking platform requires huge amount of computer horsepower. There are few enterprises that have exceeded by the basics of historical reporting on social media data to come up with useful predictions.

 

The truth is that every business enterprise must put in some time in social media and social media analytics. It is an important component for every social media user. At the same time, it is essential for a social media campaign to maximize and evaluate the online effectiveness. Social media analytics offer a new paradigm for evaluating interactive marketing by analyzing, integrating and enabling enterprises to respond to the social intelligence achieved by expanding their reach, increasing retention and generating more revenue.

 

Eminent service providers of social media analytics tools provides fast results to have a track of social media behavior in real-time. The also attain mass feedback on the things that might work and might not work for a certain product. Other advantages are as follows:-

 

  • Offers trending views and drill-down capabilities

  • Provides insights to make faster, smarter operating decisions across huge amounts of social data

  • Acquisition to revenue

  • Derives faster insights into the key influences on your K-Factor and viral campaigns

  • Understand what keeps customers engaged, and uncover the levers that can most influence revenues.

 

Facebook. Twitter, blogs, and other forms of social media platforms have grown and marketer’s needs to evaluate in an exclusive manner about the future analytics requirement in this new world of web 2.0. Popular service providers offer enterprise hosted solutions based in a client’s business challenges.

 

Read also on : Social game metrics

Industrial Supply Distributor: Geared Up for the Techno Savvy Business World

Globalization has paved way for the growth and widespread expansion of industries. However, this poses challenges for the organizations to acquire their industrial and office supplies as per requirement. The success of any organization depends on a number of interrelated factors, such as customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, effective collaboration with stakeholders and efficient supply chain network. Meeting these challenges require a streamlined business management process, which will also boost the organization’s bottom line.

The trade services sector has a number of service partners offering sophisticated distribution solutions. These solutions coupled with a deep understanding of the distribution industry, benefits the office supply dealers and industrial supply distributors to deliver valuable business transactions. With technology playing a major role in every sector, the trade services sector is not left behind. The distribution solutions designed and developed by leading trade service providers features the industry’s complete database of nearly 230 manufacturers and nearly 1 million items. This helps distributors to prepare contract submittals with current pricing of the products as well as provide for alternatives.

Being a web based software running on simple personal computers, it is easily available to the industrial supply distributor irrespective of the size of the business, making it feasible to research on product information, look for product alternatives, and provide customer with a customized price lists. Built on the same lines of the automotive parts catalog, the manufacturer catalog pages with high quality pictures of items and helps the customers visiting the distributor’s web stores to locate products with ease. The text-based and parametric-based product search option enhances customer’s online buying experience. For the industrial distributor, this enhances the product visibility and paves way for increased revenues.

Further, the software has an inbuilt scheduler that automatically updates the catalog price from the Internet.  The flexible format helps it to seamlessly integrate with the business systems, thus providing industrial supplies distributors with immediate access to current and accurate pricing for around 1 million industrial products. The on-demand updates ease the burden of manual updating paves way to reduce costs. The search engine with enhanced features like drill-down look-up methods helps to improve the methods of item list creation and manipulation. Other features that work out beneficial both to the distributor and the clientele include generation of reports pertaining to mew items and price comparison besides the import/export wizard.

The automated process in the trade service industry brings about a significant reduction in time taken for any operation and work handling of the office supply dealers or the industrial supply distributors. Further this helps to easily free the workers for a more interactive an intellectual jobs and providing them with a higher-level job options in development, deployment and maintenance of the automated processes.

Also read on - electrical estimating software, plumbing distributor

Leveraged Opportunities with Social Media Analytics

Technological advancements have produced new and innovative transformations in business operations that have opened doors to unlimited opportunities, and also increased the risks and challenges. The internet has provided new business models through the social media platforms. These platforms provide you free access to people in greater numbers without any large investments. You can expand your business network and enjoy profitable benefits by optimizing the platform. Although you can reach out to more customers the challenge is that some of them may not be ready to make a decision and some may not be interested at all. So how do you determine your prospective customers?

 

There are innumerable risks associated with this business model. You may not be aware who your potential customers are and may waste your time trying to build a business alliance with those who are not even remotely interested in your business. In the bargain you may lose the potential ones and you will never be able to achieve success if you do not have a smart strategy that helps you to identify your valuable customers. It is extremely necessary to identify your target so that you can nurture your relationship and have a loyal clientele.

 

A customer will only remain loyal to you if you can understand his needs and fulfill his expectations competently. The demands always keep changing and your business has to be flexible so that these changes can be incorporated to deliver quality performances without increasing the costs or risks. You need an efficient business operation that can help you make intelligent decisions and experience positive consequences. An efficient business operation can be established only when you have tools with worthy social intelligence capabilities.

 

The social media analytics tools ensure that all information is captured effectively and in real-time. The intelligent reporting capabilities provide you with a view of the market’s current status without any delays so that you can implement the right actions at the right time. The social analytics gives you detailed information regarding the requirements of your customers by tracking their activities continuously on the social media platforms to ascertain what kind of events they are interested in.

 

Social analytics also help you in identifying your prospective customers and ensure that you do not lose any opportunities that can increase your revenues. The information is extremely significant when comprehending the needs of your customers. They give you an insight into what will help to keep the customers engaged and continue adding value to your business.

 

The social media platforms provide highly lucrative benefits for the social gaming market. You need to keep upgrading your games and develop them as per the customers’ interests. When you provide games that satisfy the customer’s expectations you are guaranteed high retention rates and they serve as revenue boosters. Social media analytics are crucial for your business as they provide the required impetus to make a smooth progress.

 

Read also on : Actionable intelligence