Returns Management: Challenges for the Modern Day Supply Chain

A company’s supply chain is a vital component for managing both short term and long-term cash flows and cost savings. However, the lack of inventory planning, ineffective techniques and inefficient supply chain processes has a major effect on the company’s profitability. Nevertheless, the current business scenario with its globalized environment and widespread offices demands organizations with critical strategies to ensure a smooth flow of products and services to the customers. Under such tight circumstances, managing the reverse flow of products becomes a bigger issue to be dealt with.

 

Viewing critically, the reverse flow of products can be a source of opportunities for organizations to wade through during difficult times. Effective returns management can positively impact the financial condition of the organizations and pave way for stronger customer relationships. From the financial viewpoint, returns are negative adjustment of sales. Organization needs to consider the operational cost of the returns as unlike the case of forward logistics, this incurs more transportation costs, inventory carrying costs and warehouse space, all leading to higher cost of returns besides impacting customer loyalty and relationships.

 

Today’s global business environment with all the legal compliances has placed returns management as a challenge for effective supply base management. Since in the supply chain, the product can be returned from any member of the value network, the supply chain consulting organizations work towards understanding the cause of returns. This will pave way for improved decision-making in the supply chain process. The leaders in the industry sector have designed and developed integrated return product management system that would help enterprises with efficient management of the returns process.

 

Returns management being a cross-functional process, the major ground rules for its effectiveness include,

 

  • Considering returns management as a strategic point under the broader strategies of supply chain solutions.

  • Developing appropriate policies to enhance profitability and strengthen customer relationships.

  • Develop effective quality control and gate keeping policies so as to ensure that the products don’t enter the return flow.

  • Develop operational procedures to handle returns, including policies to resell returns products through the forward logistics chain.

 

Aligning performance metrics of returns management with the forward logistics strategies.

 

The common procedures used by most organizations in managing return goods include destruction of the retuned materials, warranty assessment, testing and repair, try to upgrade the software or hardware of the products in question, refurbishment and even repackaging. However, the returns management services developed by the leaders in the industry are world-class. It tends to remove the pitfalls that result in return and rework. Further, to maintain customer loyalty, the returns management service provides customers with a hassle free return system with returns materials authorization support, warranty returns, testing and debugging, repackaging and refurbishment along with web based reporting.

 

Read more on : Rack And Stack & Reverse Logistics


Extended Benefits in Business with the Data Center Solutions

The manufacture of an OEM appliance involves designing a product that helps in fulfilling all the requirements, testing the appliance to detect any flaws and rectifying them quickly and effectively without wasting too much time. The processes that you employ must facilitate faster time to market, reduce the total cost with energy-efficient processes and ensure optimum performances with custom configuration capabilities. If your process is able to fulfill all these requirements you will encounter incremented revenues. Weak processes will not give you the power to withstand competition.

The manufacturing strategy that you implement must emphasize on the use of prototype assembly and pilot run stages to understand the manufacturing challenges that are specific to a particular OEM appliance and help in validating the process that has been customized for the manufacture of that specific appliance. It must also provide insightful analysis for improving the quality of product and reducing costs.

Being an OEM manufacturer entails critical responsibilities as the quality products you manufacture are an endorsement of the values of your business, and this will help leverage your brand image. The data center is the most important component in your business. If you have a flexible, reliable and responsive data center you will be able to accomplish your mission without any hassles. It is the data center that collects, stores and provides important information meant for your business.

The data center provides you with latest and relevant updates that help you to make changes for favorable returns. If your data center is not a flexible one collaboration and integration is hindered which can affect the performance of your applications and processes. If your data center is unable to accommodate the growing demands for data the final product will have deficiencies and not be able to perform to its best.

Hence you need competent and innovative data center solutions that will help increase the efficiency and reduce costs by deploying wise practices. The solutions provide a streamlined and integrated process that helps in raising the quality and reliability standards, and facilitates the maximization of the IT infrastructure for reduced risks and greater gains. They provide you with highly efficient and cost-effective rack optimized storage servers that facilitate growth in the future and easy upgrades.

The data center solutions provide you with a high performance computing cluster infrastructure that expedites information accessibility, reduces the risks and manages the growth efficiently. It is not a difficult job to start a business. But it is definitely a challenge to maintain the quality and reputation. Stiff competition and spiraling costs can tempt you with cheap strategies but will fail to give you the desired results. The secret to success lies in finding optimum solutions that not only helps in improving the standards with better strategies but also helps in reducing the costs and risks effectively

Read Also On: Custom ComputerData Centre Solutions

Translation Software: More than Just Software

From the time of its inception people thought that computers would offer the ultimate solution to everything. Whilst this holds true, companies need to break down language barriers so that their message is aptly understood by others. Language translation is therefore more of an art than merely a science. The process involves much more than automatically converting web content into multiple languages. The constantly evolving and often ambiguous nature of human language makes highly trained professional’s research difficult on the appropriate translation for some words and paragraphs. To make the task quick and manageable there is innovative language translation software available.

Who Uses Translation Software and Why?

With 80 percent of web pages written in English, it is assumed that anyone browsing the net is conversant in English. But there are many people who want information in their native language. Though they may be able to read English, when it comes to researching information they are more comfortable in their native language. Additionally, a college student while researching on the internet can come across a web content that has vital information but written in Greek or Spanish and needs to be converted to English. Translation software offers instant access to dictionaries, thesauruses along with translation of words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs.

International organizations have detected a need for innovative translation technology for corporate websites and online catalogs. Some companies concentrate on a set of languages while others need a wide range of languages so that their products and services can reach the masses globally.

The telecom industry has witnessed this significant growth. A major challenge in this sector is offering proper customer care in various languages. This means the information has to be easily available to consumers in their own language. Popular brands in the telecom sector that use advanced translation software include Vodafone, Ericsson, Comverse, Motorola, France Telecom and Amdocs.


Apart from global support, advanced automated translation software:

• Assists professionals to easily deliver multilingual support information, for instance knowledge bases, email and chat.
• Helps marketing professionals to translate user generated content and pre-sales information for launching new websites in new markets. It also offers a unified experience globally. 
• Allows intelligence workers and government analysts to quickly translate foreign language information for crucial mission decision making.
• Enables localization professionals to enhance translation throughput by adding automation into standard human translation workflow.

Industry Offerings in Translation Software

Today there are several enterprises that provide translation software at an affordable price without compromising service quality. A good and effective translation provider needs to generate maximum sales for making good profit. These enterprises help in bridging the gap between their international clients and their business.

Advanced translation software learns to translate new data correctly by assessing the previous human translations. It automatically offers a quality score with every translation. There are trained language pairs to offer greater accuracy for verticals and domains. These solutions are scalable to manage any unmatched speed and other ongoing translation and publishing needs.

Read Also On : Website Translation


Vulnerability Management for a Secure IT Environment

The transformation of today's organizations into techno-savvy enterprises is based on their technology landscape. These organizations with their innumerable servers,  desktops, storage devices , laptops and networks paves the way for storage and smooth flow of critical information and data across their network. However, with loopholes in wireless network, deficiencies in infrastructure and cyber threats, customized applications and data become exposed and are vulnerable to cyber attacks both from external and internal sources.  


Organizations, concerned about IT and security compliance opt for managing their vulnerability status using vulnerability management systems.


Vulnerability Management can be defined as a measurable and continuous  process that enables organizations to understand the risk of the vulnerabilities existent in its IT environment and helps protect the vital data, customer information,  network assets and intellectual property. Digital data needs to be managed efficiently as it resides in assets of the organization and is the core of Governance, Risk, and Compliance Management process for any enterprise.


Globalization has further led to increased demands on IT sector; there needs to be a process that aims towards sustainability, consistency and transparency throughout the management process of the organization. However, the dependency of these global organizations on the IT world to collaborate, communicate and share information through web applications, blogs, and social-networking sites has paved the way for them to be vulnerable to a variety of attacks, security breaches and data leaks. An accurate Vulnerability assessment will provide organizations with a baseline of action towards acquiring a right balance between technology and business intelligence.


The vast security threats lurking over these technologically enabled organizations call for an effective vulnerability management solution which needs to be compliant with government regulations and have pci compliance/iso compliance as well.


Gartner suggests an effective vulnerability management program which includes:

  • Implementation of information security compliance policies, identifying device configurations, user identity and resource access.

  • Understanding security and vulnerability status based on the organization’s environmental baseline.

  • Prioritizing vulnerabilities based on risk impacts and efforts

  • Using network security tools to protect and shield organization’s critical data

  • Mitigating external threats and internal security postures with effective strategies and activities followed by continuous maintenance and monitoring of the IT infrastructure and environment.   


The leading service providers of vulnerability management solutions make use of governance, risk, and compliance controls, documents, workflow, and repositories to assess the vulnerability status and design solutions to combat vulnerabilities as well as threat management.


Also read on - compliance management solution, iso compliance

HIPAA Solutions for an Effective and Secure Business Operation

HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, was introduced in 1996, to protect sensitive patients information from being stolen or destroyed.It isnow mandatory for any company that deals with protected health information (PHI) to ensure that all administrative, physical, and technical safeguards, policies and procedures and documentation requirements, and effective risk management are in place and followed diligently. This process includes covered entities (CE), anyone who provides treatment, payment and operations in healthcare, and business associates (BA) or anyone with access to patient information and provides support in treatment, payment or operations.


Due to increased use, storage and transmittal of electronic health information in recent times, HITECH or The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act was introduced,which supports the enforcement of HIPAA requirements by raising the penalties of health organizations that violate HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules.


The fines for non-compliance are heavy with many organizations compelled to pay large amounts as fine. With the HITECH initiation,the standards became stricter and penalties more steep. Incentives for maintenance of electronic health records also started with the HITECH regulation. This has led to implementation of standardized and HIPAA/HITECH requirements compliant processes in every healthcare organization in the country.


Many healthcare companies viewed increasing the effectiveness of the compliance program  as an expensive project,while some of them struggled to restrict the costs and enhance the efficiency of their own security programs. But today, things are much easier with the availability of automated enterprise HIPAA compliance solutions.


A streamlined and centralized compliance management process ensures that the compliance policies of healthcare businesses are in alignment with the HIPAA and HITECH regulatory controls. These solutions are cloud-based and can be customized according to the requirements of the business and are available on-demand.

Some of their key features are:

  • These regulatory controls provide prompt real-time report on the risk status of the healthcare business.

  • The solution is extremely easy to deploy and manage, thus reducing the time and costs required to stay compliant.

  • It provides integration capabilities for management of business associates and vendors.

  • The compliance framework easily adopts and collaborates with all other frameworks thus making the environment more secure.

  • The solution provides consistent and real-time monitoring services with an opportunity to detect any loopholes and take corrective actions without any delays and automatically updates the existing policies as per the current regulations.


The HIPPA/HITECH solution is a simple, cost-effective model that saves costs of expensive infrastructure or facilities. All data is stored in secure locations and the transfer of critical information is carried out under stringent supervision only.The solution grooms healthcare business to be eligible for the incentives and won appreciation from both patients as well as the compliance authorities. The enterprise HIPAA compliance solution addresses all security, risk and compliance related issues comprehensively, providing businesses with an opportunity to concentrate on their core competencies and improving the revenues.


Also read on - meaningful use in healthcare, IT risk management

Ensure Better Compliance with Effective Risk Management Solutions

Given the existing business environment and the complexity of ever-changing regulations, today’s risk management professionals are under more pressure than ever to constantly overcome challenges related to fraudulent activities and identity thefts. Besides being financial imperative, detecting and preventing these types of activities is now under the purview of regulatory law as well. So, when it comes to risks and vulnerabilities in an organization, the difference between success and failure often comes down to how proactive an organization is at addressing these threats and thefts.

Compliance of all types has become the primary driver for any data security program, and organizations are spending huge sums on governance, risk and compliance to deal with it these days. IT security and compliance processes include managing the regulatory compliance requirements that govern IT security today. The cost of not managing such a risk can have tremendous impact on the bottom-line and hence, detecting risk before an incident happens is very critical. 

There are various risk categories and control frameworks to coordinate and evaluate,that makes managing risk and compliance simultaneously, tough. This leaves enterprises wondering how to manage complete compliance and remain cost-effective as well.

The best way to meet this challenge effectively is to adopt an approach that reduces business risk, ensure better compliance and thereby, gain competitive market advantage. With an effective risk management solution, organizations can secure efforts and improve vulnerability management, and also increase the visibility of risk throughout the enterprise. 

Investing in an automated compliance management solution provides an integrated and automated framework that supports all the above compliance requirements. It addresses all security, compliance, audit, and risk management needs of your business effectively, and lowers the total cost of ownership as well. Such risk management solutions can be cost-effective when it is available as an on-demand cloud based service with a low investment and enhanced returns. 

So, the first step in ensuring complete regulatory compliance is to choose the best risk management solution. The right compliance risk management programs implemented by opting for risk management solutions will largely reduce business risks and help increase ROI.

Also read on - meaningful use of electronic health records, vendor management

Electronic Discovery: The Tech Savvy Litigation Support

Technological innovations has given birth to organizations, which communicate electronically. The vast growth of electronically stored information has made it a challenging task for the enterprises to streamline data collections and data analysis. Further, with globalization bringing in international offices, multicultural workforce and widely spread out customers there has been a tremendous increase in litigation, regulatory inquiries and internal investigation. The legal teams of the enterprises are also challenged with early case assessments, analyzing vast amounts of electronic information and faster handling of the corporate litigation process.

 

The process of searching, locating or handling vast amount of electronic data during internal investigations or for use as evidence in any civil or criminal legal case is referred to as electronic discovery or e-discovery and can be carried out either in offline mode or in networked environment. However, working with digital data makes investigations much easier as scrutinizing through electronic media is way ahead of the manual work. Further, been electronic stored data, this is not easily erased out of the systems in a networked environment as it is available on multiple locations and hard disks. Hence all evidence is available somewhere or other and can be easily located.

 

The traditional system of electronic discovery services was made up of delays, risk to the business and increased legal and IT cost. Nevertheless the modern day enterprises though techno savvy, e-discovery is still a challenge for most of these organizations as they are not ready to with an effective electronic data discovery system. One of the best practices is to work out amicable relationships between the technical and legal teams. Misunderstandings and lack of cooperation within the teams will only lead to higher litigation costs. However, being e-discovery ready and use of litigation support software, enterprises can be fit enough to face the challenge.

 

The leaders in the service sector for legal discovery solutions, provides the client organizations with electronic data discovery platforms, which would identify every stage of the e-discovery lifecycle. Addressing a complex and scalable requirements these helps the legal teams to understand the facts and work out faster case assessments. Such end-to-end e-discovery solutions mitigate streamlining all collections into a single console for easier management. Further, this paves way for lowering the processing and production cost, increases productivity and enhances defenses. The electronic discovery platform works out as a turnkey solution complete with all infrastructure needed for electronic data discovery.

Customer Reach and Retention through Social Media Analytics

Every business, irrespective of its size follows two most fundamental objectives- lead acquisition and brand building. Over the years organizations have been working out with various marketing strategies to achieve these. However, today's technological world with wide spread use of the Internet and importance given to the social media by the next generation customers has changed the way the objectives are achieved.

 

Social media today is the new business mantra and social networking sites have become conversation efficient with both in linear and non-linear communications links.  Started as an informal media for people spread across geographical locations  to meet, make new friends,  share emotions, insights, and experiences, social networking sites today has graduated as a platform for people to influence others in their purchasing decisions and  change brand loyalties.  Using these developments for social media analytics,  business houses and corporate sectors understand the social intelligence of their customer base.

 

Strategists have defined social media analytics as the practice of understanding customers and predicting them on the basis of the data available from the web. With the help of the social media analytics tools, organizations can measure conversations, sentiments, gather insight, influence people and connect to potential customers. It also helps the enterprises in taking business decisions, optimize products, features and services as per requirement, adopt corrective measures and protect the brand image.

 

The tools used in analytics for facebook or any other social networking sites facilitates organizations to measure their interactive marketing and effectiveness online. This offers the enterprise opportunities to integrate analyze and enables actionable intelligence to reach out to more customers, increase retention leading to higher revenue growth.

 

The rapid growth of social media among the generation next, has paved way for organizations to take help of analytics solutions. The leading developers have worked out enterprise hosted solutions to track the social media behaviors in a real-time mode, customized to the organization's unique business challenges. Such results generated in real-time will help clients track social media behaviors, provide insights for a faster and smarter operating decisions across larger social circle.

 

With a strategy to promote a broader market for e-commerce, organizations make use of social analytics tools, that leverages the social intelligence of the organizations. Other advantages of using such applications include accurate measuring of the effectiveness of acquisition campaigns, ability to monitor on the virtual currency magnetization and other engagement tracking metrics. Thus giving the client organizations an automated business process that would continuously improve on the social intelligence.

 

Read more onsocial intelligence

 

 

Tax Planning Services for Business Entities

Entrepreneurship is much sought after by the generation next with promises of a  good revenue and earning capacity.  Equipped with inherent qualities of a leader , a drive to achieve through thick and thin and ability to market oneself and the products sound success for the entrepreneurs. With every industry sector open to the entreprenuer to start a business operation, incorporation of this is  a starting point of a continuous process.

A Business entity formation can either be as a Sole Proprietorships, Partnership, Limited Liability Company or a Corporation.  With tax regulations and other compliance regulations that bind each, it is very vital to understand each entity before actually forming it.

Sole Proprietorships: Owned and run by one individual these are inexpensive to form and easy to  dissolve with  no tax aspects as all profits and losses of the business are considered as part of the proprietor’s  personal income. The company is disregarded for all tax purposes.

Partnerships: – Though inexpensive to form, it involves two or more business entities with liabilities.  Taxation is complex, with the firm required to file an informational tax returns to the government.

Limited Liability Companies or LLCs – A  highly flexible business entity with nil to limited liability  with the option to be  taxed either as corporations, or as partners or even  be disregarded for taxation  like a sole proprietorship.

Corporations are much complex business entities with its life independent of the shareholders. It works as a new legal entity and need to conform to taxations rules of the state. However, every entity formation offers a  distinct tax and business advantages.

The present day business scenario with footprints across wide geographical boundaries demands that the enterprises are in compliance with the regulations and policies of various locations. Stringent adherence to compliance regulations by the corporate sectors is required to ensure that their workforce is well aware of the tax regulatory policies prevalent in the region and adhere to the same. Evading taxes might put the employees and the employer in difficult situations as it is punishable under the law.

Effective tax planning is very vital for the organizations as well as for all the employees. Tax planners and professional consultants help organizations with the effective ways for planning out the corporate taxes and financial matters.  The large corporate sectors are benefitted by their in-house tax planning services and financial consultants, who work out tax planning strategies whereas the small and medium enterprises follow tax regulations.

Further with a number of entity formations of multinational stature setting base in India and similarly Indian companies leaving imprints on the global map, theseorganizations need to also adhere to the regulations of Foreign Bank Account reporting and its added taxation issues. Such provisions made for corporate compliance will ensure reduced to nil tax evasion, embezzlement, account maintenance in different banks, mail frauds and will also put a stop to conspiracy.

Read More On: India Income Tax Return

Developments in Biometric Services by CRO’s

 

The Biometrics technology has been there for a long time since the time of the standard finger print scanner. It not only helped to change the face of security and healthcare industry, but there have been much medical advancement done using innovative models of biometrics systems. One of the innovative developments has been the eye sensor controlled wheel chair. Simply put, this chair will automatically move in a certain direction with the assistance of an eye ball movement detection sensor. While there are many medical discoveries being made in this domain, there are many Indian medical institutions that have expanded their Biometrics service portfolio.

 

Indian CRO’s and their Biometrics Services

Popular Indian clinical research organizations i.e. CRO’s are equipped with their own Biometrics team that are well trained and assist in numerous clinical trials and other medical researches that take within the clinical laboratory. Their service portfolios are generally used by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, diagnostics, research and device.

 

Furthermore, the Indian CRO’s offer a complete range of data management services in Phase I -IV Clinical Trials and bio-equivalence. The main agenda here is to convert raw data into accurate, reliable and consistent clinical trial output in compliance with the regulatory policies. Leading CRO’s are often act as dedicated partner for the success of their client’s clinical development program for which their Biometrics team concentrates to speed up the regulatory submission process and reduce timelines by advanced thinking and commitment to quality.

 

They also have the ability to manage multi-centric studies as well as Phase 1 Study for domestic and global requirements in numerous therapeutic areas. The Biometrics service portfolio includes the following:-

 

Database Programming

  • CRF Design (paper & electronic)

  • CRF Annotation

  • Database Programming

  • Validation Checks

  • Metadata Repository Management

 

Data Management

  • Data Acquisition

  • Data Reconciliation

  • Discrepancy Management

  • Medical Coding (MeDRA & WHODD)

  • Database Lock

  • Data Extraction for Reporting

 

Pharmacokinetic & Pharmacodynamic Studies

  • Sampling Point Estimation

  • Technical Document Review

  • PK/PD Query Resolution

  • PK/PD Subject Matter Expert

  • Pharmacokinetic support across study engagement

 

PK/PD Reporting

  • SDMS Data Extraction

  • PK Data Analysis

  • PK Summary Reporting

 

Biostatistics

  • Randomization

  • Sample size estimation

  • Trial Design Inputs

  • Statistical Analysis Plan

  • Statistical Analysis

  • Biostatistics Subject Matter Expert

     

Statistical Reporting

  • TLF Programming

  • CDISC Data Mapping (SDTM & ADaM)

  • Clinical Data Repository

  • Pooled Data Analysis & Reporting

  • Safety (ADR) Reporting

  • Patient Profiles & Data Cleaning Reporting

 

Biometrics technologies are taking great leaps and the new discoveries in this field will also be of help to people with complete paralysis. It is beneficial to medical candidates and testing sponsors. The testing sponsors are able to secure value of credentialing program by maintaining the integrity of the testing process. Furthermore, it deters proxy setting through a highly visible system.