Make Returns Management a part of the Supply chain Wheel

Product returns are a reality in every business and often goods that are returned become a problem for organization as most distribution networks are not geared for managing returns. Boxes of returns wind up on warehouse shelves taking up valuable space and at a later stage during warehouse inventory these returned goods are thrown away, returning nothing to the supply chain solutions.

According to Gartner Research, the average cost of processing a return electronically is $4.75 compared with $25 when returns are processed through a call center.

Having an effective returns management in place can positively impact your firm’s financial performance in today’s competitive environment. You need to understand that returns do affect your overall bottom-line. Reverse logistics and how product returns are handled can be the differentiator between profitability and loss for many companies.

Every returned product incurs a cost whether it is to you or the customer. Companies need to carefully monitor the cost of unplanned returns and also maintain customer satisfaction and retention. Moreover if a replacement product is being sent, transportation charge is again incurred. Companies that handle returns effectively and resolve service issues can improve a customer’s loyalty to their organization.

Organizations need to look at returns process in a logical and efficient manner. Integrating informational technology with operational process is most critical in returns management, where companies' product returns are tightly controlled and customers are in the loop and know what and where the product is in the pipeline.

Whether the returned product are fixed and put back in inventory, disassembled for spare parts, returned to the contract manufacturer or disposed, everything has to be planned for. With returns approaching 20% of outgoing shipments, managing reverse logistics can be the difference between profitability and loss.

A good reverse logistics system not only improves corporate bottom line, but it can also improve customer trust and confidence in you, especially in today’s tough business climate. Hence returns logistics management should be equally as important as the forward logistics. All this can be simply proactively managing what previously was thought a hindrance and turning it into a usable resource.

Know more about :- Systems Integration, evaluation system

 

Data Center Management – Key to Smooth IT Infrastructure Management

IT operations are a crucial aspect of most organizational operations. One of the main concerns is business continuity; companies rely on their information systems to run their operations. It is necessary to provide a reliable infrastructure for IT operations, in order to minimize any chance of disruption. Information security is also a concern, and for this reason a data center has to offer a secure environment which minimizes the chances of a security breach.

Today, numerous IT companies offer their clients efficient data center management solutions that help in smooth data and IT infrastructure management. These companies possess technological expertise in maintaining and setting up data centers and by reducing the data management costs they offer value proposition to their customers. In addition to that, they also provide co-location allowing customers to place their respective servers at their data-center. This option of allowing the customers to keep their servers at the “state-of-the-art” data center, will allow them to concentrate of their business much better.

Eminent service providers of datacenter management have got their own data centers at various locations in India. Some of them are equipped with a service capacity of over 150 servers and state-of-the art infrastructure along with adequate redundancy. Furthermore, the datacenters are active 24 x 7 and offers above 99 percent uptime to its users. Few other services offered are listed below-

1. TIER IV infrastructure

2. 99.995% Uptime SLA

3. Six zone security

4.Carrier Neutral

5. Located in the safest seismic zone

6. 24x forever Support

7. Expert technical know-how and manpower

With the new age data center management services users have the access to a 24x 7 consistent, proactive management and monitoring approach that ensures the needed uptimes. This in turn results in an effective workflow and data center management.

Other Links: Small business financial management, growers solution, manufacturing ERP solutions

 

How to Find Foreclosed Homes in Your Area

A foreclosure is undoubtedly a devastating experience for a homeowner. However, if you are a first-time homebuyer or investor, foreclosures present a major opportunity for you to strike a good deal. But the challenge often lies in locating foreclosures. You should know where to look for foreclosure listings, and which is the right place to be in, at the right time. So if you are trying to locate foreclosures in your area, it is important that you take advantage of different information sources.

It may be difficult to gauge when foreclosure listings will surface, but most often these listings are available in print or in searchable databases online. While a direct online search may only bring up generic results (which may not show you specific details of foreclosures in your area), you could look to websites that offer a broad range of area home listings, like Trulia, Zillow, realestate.yahoo.com and Realtor.com. By searching these sites and registering with some of them, you can receive periodic updates on foreclosure listings in your neighborhood.

Another reliable source of real-estate information is the website of the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which provides state-by-state listing of properties including foreclosures. There are also other government agencies like the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) or Veterans’ Authority (VA) which offer real-estate information.

Your bank may be a good source of information for foreclosure listings. Since banks are usually keen on finding buyers for foreclosed properties, you not only can locate foreclosures in your area easily, but you may also be able to strike a great home bargain. Most banks these days also are making foreclosure information accessible online through their websites.

Yet another great way to find foreclosed homes is driving down your neighborhood to see if there are any properties with For Sale signs that include ‘foreclosed’, ‘bank-owned’ or ‘bank repo.’ If you find one, all you need to do is call the agent whose name is on the sign and inquire about the property. Even if the property has been sold, the agent may have information on other foreclosures in the area. By doing this, you can get to know about area foreclosures, and get a jump on other buyers.

And last but not the least, as you try your luck with these various sources, do not forget to keep your eyes open for listings in traditional sources like newspapers, and other real-estate magazines or newsletters. Sometimes flipping through the pages of your local newsletter is all it takes to find a good foreclosed property!

 

Back Relief Exercise- A Natural Way To A Healthy Back

Back pain is one of the most common medical conditions and unfortunately is the most frustrating condition for the patient and doctor alike. Understanding the cause of back pain is the key to proper treatment. Our back supports our whole structure; hence it is very necessary to clearly understand the causes of the pain before working out natural back pain remedies.

Back pain can be caused by Lumbar Muscle Strain and is the common cause for low back pain. But in most cases this type of pain originating due to muscle spasms are cleared off very soon. Rupturing of the intervertebral disc, or herniated disc, is another common cause of back pain. Discogenic back pain also results from the damage to the intervertebral disc, but without disc herniation. As age catches up, the spinal chord becomes tight and rigid, causing pain in the back. Other causes of back pain are Arthritis, Spinal Stenosis, Spondylolisthesis and Osteoporosis.

Depending on the condition of the back, causes and symptoms, there are a number of methods by which one can be relieved from back pain. The treatments for back pain can be grouped under three categories:

  • Non-Surgical

  • Alternative treatments

  • Spine surgery

Once you are aware of the reasons for back pain, it is advisable to work towards reliving one from the same. A suffering back need not be a lifelong companion. Using alternative treatments such as simple back muscle exercises, yoga, stretches etc is a great way for a safe back. These back stretch exercises will loosen up the back, make it supple as well as restore posture. Regularity in following this exercise routine will not only increase blood circulation, release muscle tightness and spasms but also will improve the health and fitness levels and aid in the detoxification process. Toxins and metabolic waste in the blood and muscles are one of the reasons for inflammation and pain.

Simple and effective back pain relief exercises with the help of certain back relief products or exercising aids will only enhance the fitness experience. For those who are already going through some level of back pain, using the back pain relief exercising products, will help to start the exercise routine in slow and simple movements. Starting with a few repetitions, one can increase the speed, motion and repetitions depending on the level of comfort. Back relief exercises, which can be done with the help of the aids, are vertical arcs, horizontal arcs, arm circles and mini crunches.

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Understanding How to Track Social Media Analytics

Although relatively a new phenomenon, social media has become a significant source of website traffic. Social Media describes online technologies and practices used by people to share experiences, opinions, and insights through the use of images, videos, audio, and text. Social networks, blogs, micro-blogs, video sharing networks, and image sharing networks make up much of the online social media destinations used today. Other, more familiar, social networks include websites such as forums and instant messaging. Social media analytics are a set of tools that are used to measure the activity across social media networks. But social media analytics is young, and not many people know where to start. These tips can help you effectively gather and analyze social media analytics.

  • Understand what needs to be tracked

It is most important to understand and decide what needs to be tracked, as you can’t conquer what you don’t understand. Understand if you want to track how people are sharing your website or if you want to track a social media campaign, or the trends that are related to a particular social media phenomenon. Each of these requires a different focus and a different set of tools. For instance, if you are going to track social media website engagement, then it is necessary to focus on traffic statistics.

  • Optimize on the current analytics software

Most of these analytics tools can track a large amount of data, but they are usually not intended for the tracking of social media data. There are, however a few ways to optimize your analytics software for social media.

  1. Social Media Metrics Plugin - An extension that adds a social media information layer to Google Analytics.

  2. Set up particular campaigns for social media - Most analytics software has custom campaigns to make it easy to track specific events.

  3. Rearrange dashboards and set up email reports - To get specific information on social media, have traffic stats from top social media websites emailed to you so you can see it all in one place.

  • Add new tools

Adding on more social media analytics tools to the existing tools can help you get started to track analytics related to social media better. The other analytic that can be included are

  1. Xinureturns - provides a great dashboard overview of your website’s standing in social media.

  2. PostRank - provides detailed information on Tweets, Stumbles, diggs, and FriendFeed all in one place. It’s best for blogs and websites with a lot of content.

  3. SocialToo - is a comprehensive tool for creating social surveys and tracking social stats. It also will send you a daily email.

  • Amass your analytics

Aggregate your analytics information, as there is no time to look at all of the tools. There are a lot of tools for gathering social media information, but one place doesn’t have everything you need. As there is no single tool that will bring this information together, building a spreadsheet may be best for playing with the numbers.

  • Evaluate and Engage

The actual analysis is the most import part. It takes a lot of dedication to the art of web analytics to understand how each variable affects website traffic and user engagement. By looking at the data in one place and comparing the information, you will be able to pick up on trends.

Analytic metrics provide insight into the world of consumers unlike ever before. Such tools can be used to proactively engage with consumers or potential consumers. So take the time to find great tools and to understand how each of the social media levers affects traffic and analytics data.


Unified Storage – Benefits of Unified Storage Solutions

Unified storage is sometimes referred, as Network Unified Storage (NUS) and is a type of storage system that helps in managing and operating applications and files from one device. This system consolidates block-based and file-based access within one storage platform and assists in IP-base SAN, fibre channel SAN and NAS, i.e. Network attached storage.

Unified storage systems manage the block-based input/output and simultaneously enable data storage. In reality, it is often deployed as a NAS platform that is renovated to include block-mode support. The new age unified storage solutions helps in reducing hardware requirements for an organization. In place of different storage platforms, such as RAID disk array for block-based storage and NAS for file-based storage, unified storage brings together, both modes in one device. Similarly, the single device can be implemented either for block or file storage as needed.

Service providers of unified storage systems have introduced customized recovery, unified storage and back up solutions, that enables organizations to minimize back up expenses, enhance protection and streamline data recovery.

The innovative Deduplication storage system significantly minimizes the quantity of disk storage required to secure and maintain enterprise information. By recognizing the outmoded data and files while they are stored, the unified storage offers a storage footprint that is about 10x – 30x small on an average as compared to the original dataset. The back up data is effectively retrieved and replicated over present networks for simplifying consolidated tape operations and disaster recovery.

Speaking about unified storage it is important to discuss about storage consolidation as well. This is the concept of sharing and consolidating storage resources amidst several application servers. This consolidation offers a common platform to manage and assign increasing demands for data storage while minimizing administrative attempts and enhancing storage utilization.

Service providers of unified storage have also introduced storage consolidation solutions that use innovative technologies and are created in order to enhance efficiencies, maximize storage assets, carry on operations with the present infrastructure and provide elasticity to influence future technologies.

 

Importance of Online Brand Protection

Online buying or selling, which is more appropriately termed as Ecommerce has gained prominence over the past few years. Today, an Ecommerce model done with proper planning and marketing initiatives can be a lucrative market. However, if you have launched your Ecommerce website and thought all you need to do in addition is online promotion, then there are additional considerations. In today world, social networking forums have created an avenue for you to display your product; it also holds an added hazard for you. Along with publicity, there is also scope for negative publicity, which might hamper your business. Hence, you need to undertake proper measures for online brand protection.

Before you begin, it is imperative to understand, what exactly online brand protection is? In elementary terms, its is a suite of defense measures for your online business The proprietor of a certain brand name is authorized to secure its trademark from any third party intrusion by using certain online methods.

Importance of Online Brand Protection

Have you ever questioned why online brand protection techniques are important? It is necessary to realize that your trade or business name or concern represents your profitable identity. There is a reputation factor attached to it. Hence, brand name or company name as one would like to call it, is the most precious possession for a proprietor or industrialist. It represents your brand’s good will, trustworthiness along with online popularity and success. Therefore, it is important to protect your brand name from any unwanted negative impact or negative publicity.

There are situations, when customers out of lack of awareness remarks about a product, good or service. This might tarnish the brand’s reputation. The best way to solve it is adopting to online brand protection techniques. These tools offer customized solutions to various companies and organization depending upon their requirement.

Today, the market offers you eminent service providers of online brand protection solutions. The services that these companies offer to the users and clients are listed below -

  • Monitors globally on an everyday basis for any scope of illegal activity.

  • Conduct test buys to affirm unlawful product sales.

  • Offers audit trails of evidentiary data for enforcement actions.

  • Shutdown offending listings on marketplace sites, and track success in these efforts.

  • Automatically generates C&D or any other types of correspondence.

  • Automatically classifies and ranks the offenders.

Such software applications have the capability to offer users in-depth information on seller, product, individual listing levels that enables your brand to take decisions based on upgraded inputs concerning where to invest the brand protection amount most effectively.

Know more on : Brand monitoring

 

Understanding the Significance of Online Meeting tools

Meetings are an indispensable activity of any business. Regardless of whether you are running a one-man operation or work in a conglomerate, meetings with suppliers, colleagues, subordinates, and/or superiors are absolutely essential. Interactions and knowledge and information sharing is made possible through meetings. Most of the employees in today’s enterprises are located in various parts of the world, which makes it a challenge to conduct a meeting successfully. To overcome this challenge and ensure complete attendance from all the employees, global enterprises have come to rely on the online virtual world. With flexibility of Internet Protocol, availability of large capacities of IP backbone and the growing sophistication of online meeting software, all one needs is a computer and access to the Internet to conduct an online meeting. 


Online meeting software can make businesses run efficiently. It is important to understand the needs and requirements of the business as not all the software products have the same features. The needs from a large corporation down to a small business can be vastly different and the overall structure of your business makes a big difference in what you will ultimately require in online meeting software. As online meeting tools can be utilized by enterprises for a number of things like sales presentations, webinars, training sessions, etc, they ensure that global enterprises do not miss out on disseminating critical information to their employees spread over the world.


Online meeting software has several advantages when compared to the traditional form of meetings. Being fundamentally cost effective, there is no need to prepare a venue, nor is there any need to  travel to attend the meeting. With online meetings, the participants can continue to do their work without missing the meeting, thereby facilitating multitasking. Online meeting software has powerful tools that enhance real time collaboration among the participants. There are powerful moderator tools in online meeting software that can be used to completely control the meeting. As it has powerful security features, anyone who is not invited will not be allowed to join a meeting. Here, the online meeting participation can be controlled.  Most of the online meeting software has the ability to record the meeting’s proceedings for future review, playback, and broadcast. This ensures the availability of knowledge as and when it is required.


Global enterprises have the assurance of effective communication between participants in real time with these online meeting tools. It is therefore important to choose the best online meeting tool that can take your organization to new heights of success.


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Software Localization- Globalization without Language Barriers

Working in a global business scenario, with multicultural environment, multilingual communication becomes the keyword. Under such circumstances, translation of the language into a communicative form is equally important. Translation is not easy without a clear understanding and meaning of certain words. Thus, acronyms, abbreviations, and terminologies can cause frustration when attempting to translate. Translation departments and bureaus generally engage translators or have an exclusive terminology sections to handle research on terminologies.

To meet the demands of the business houses and corporate sectors for more frequent and speedy translation, IT companies have designed and developed specialized translation tools. This new technological innovation will help translators’ speed up the translation process while maintaining high quality standards. The translation software thus designed has a number of tools and in-built technological features such as translation memory, terminology management and automated translation and software localization tools.

Terminology management solution facilitates effective and accurate translations by organizing the terms with a clear set of rules for their usage. With an assured high quality global content and brand consistency, this technology helps to reduce the time taken to translate. This ensures correct usage of the term, improves internal communications and reduces the delivery time taken for the product in the global market. This further has far-reaching impacts on the business and customer relationships. The solution allows to store and manage all the important terminology in multilingual format in a location, accessible from anywhere irrespective of location or equipment. Terminology management is a key component to managing global content and communicating with global customers effectively.

The translation memory software stores sentences or paragraphs of text as translation units. Though used in combination with the terminology management tool, it is different from the latter in that; the terminology management tool is database with rules and regulations of usage. When translation is carried out without any human intervention, it is referred to as automated translation or machine translation.

The modus operandi used for acclimatizing or customizing software, a web product or a related document to meet the cultural, linguistic and technical requirements of the client is termed as Software localization. Being carried out as a simultaneous process, this ensures that different language versions of the product are shipped across to various geographical locations at the same time. This localization software includes analysis of the material, evaluation of the resources required for localization, cultural, technical and linguistic assessment, creation of terminology glossaries, translation to the target language, adaptation of the user interface and resizing of forms and compilation and build of the localized files for testing. It paves way to translate new type of content too.

Read More On : localization software, Software localization, translation tools

Streamline Your Virtual Events with Online Meeting Tools

Today, with online meeting tools, global enterprises can do away with the concept boardroom meetings.  Meetings and knowledge sharing sessions are of paramount importance for the global brands. As a result, these enterprises always want hundred-percent attendance with all the key members of the company attending the meeting. Sometimes, it can happen that certain key members are located outstation, hence cannot attend the face-to-face any interactive session arranged by the company. Today, the world is getting all-virtual that offers innovative applications and software solution to facilitate better business functioning. Online tools for meetings and conferences are one of them.

Companies use online meeting tools for numerous purposes such as sales presentations, video trainings and webinars and many more. Sometimes, they are used to convey CEO messages to the employees from the HO or even in trainee induction modules. These tools ensure that organizations that have worldwide operations do not fall short of circulating crucial information to their working members round the globe. These tools make it possible for virtual communications to take place with precision and accuracy.

Benefits of Online Meeting Tools

Let us have a look at some of the benefits of the new age online meeting tools. The benefits are-

  • Updated content dissemination and distribution with no hassles

  • Has the ability to set up reports on content utilization and member participation

  • Facilitates improved communication with co-workers

  • Ensures participation of all key members

  • There is no wastage of time in searching for content as content sharing can be easily facilitated

  • There is no requirement of reserving place and time for conferences and meetings

  • There is no transport costs as the tool enables participation for the event from the workstations of different members

  • Sets up of customized virtual events with dedicated time zones

These online tools and applications facilitate effective interaction between every member. Simultaneously, the meetings can be recorded. Employees who could not make it to the online meeting due to any unwarranted situation can take all necessary feeds from the recorded video. In addition to that, companies of global eminence are equipped with the facility to keep a vigilant eye on the overall attendance of such meetings, conferences and training sessions. Furthermore, the companies are also able to choose the participants for a particular event.

With innovative in-built technologies that cab assure the organizations with a complete security package, best control tools and simple video training tools, global organizations can put all their worries for online meetings and conferences aside.

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