Archive

General Motors and Ford suffered declining U.S. sales in August. Each announced Wednesday that it will cut production in the fourth quarter, risking profitability for the calendar year. Chrysler, on the other hand, beat the bum month experienced by its competitors with its fifth straight month of sa...

Many people consider order management the heart of any enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. It's heresy in many manufacturing companies even to talk of changing from a home-grown order-management system to an outside ERP system. One world-class distributor is an example of one reason why. It h...

Siemens Business Services, SAP and Intel have announced a new radio frequency identification product. Privacy experts, however, continue to express concern about the technology. The new product allows suppliers to comply with demands from Wal-Mart, Target and German retailer Metro that they attach R...

Not satisfied to be slowpokes in sales and customer service, the life insurance industry has continued to invest in customer relationship management (CRM) technology even as others have shied away from making capital expenditures in the current economy. No matter the market's misery, these insurance...

A new study by Canadian researchers indicates a woman's chance of breast cancer returning after surgery is significantly reduced by following up with radiation therapy and tamoxifen. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, was attempting to determine if women with low-risk breas...

As investors awaited a ruling in the antitrust suit of PeopleSoft against hostile takeover bidder Oracle, rumors circulated that a white knight bidder may emerge, kicking Oracle and its persistent pursuit of PeopleSoft to the curb. Among the rumored third bidders are IBM, Microsoft, and the German f...

Best Buy Co. has announced the rollout of an electronic product code (EPC) strategy designed to increase its supply chain efficiency over the next several years. The company yesterday said it plans to leverage radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to drive the change. RFID allows retailer...

The customer is king again. After decades of mass-market driven customer outreach, which typically lumped customers in large, homogenous segments, a complex mix of socioeconomic factors coupled with a proliferation of new media and technologies have put the customer back in the driver's seat. Today'...

Offshore outsourcing of IT infrastructure management is likely to be the next big wave, according to results of a recent survey conducted by Wipro Technologies. According to the online survey of 145 executives from various industries, more than 30 percent of the respondents are planning to offshore ...

Too many companies take a very automated, ATM-like approach to the ROI they get from industry analyst organizations they work with. For all the cash these companies deposit, they expect only a quote from time to time from their industry analysts, hopefully generated with the same efficiency of a 24/...

The European Commission on Wednesday opened an in-depth investigation into plans for joint takeover of ContentGuard, a US anti-piracy tech firm, by Microsoft and Time Warner. ContentGuard, formerly controlled by Xerox, is active in the development and licensing of intellectual property rights (IPRs)...

After years of job losses due to the decline in the manufacturing and lumber industries, the Pacific Northwest may be seeing a bright spot for growth as call centers target the region. Oregon seems to have more pull when it comes to new centers being put in. Recently, Royal Caribbean chose the state...

A fully interactive, Web-based three-day conference and expo set for November is designed to connect contact center professionals with developers of IP technology and industry experts in what the promoters say is the first-ever virtual event of its kind for call centers. The IP ONLINE Conference and...

Micro marketing, one-to-one marketing, niche marketing. Whatever buzzwords are used to define it, the trend driving businesses today and tomorrow is the need to profitably serve smaller and smaller audiences. This focus on knowing thy customer on a one-to-one basis is fueled by advances in technolog...

With the recent release of Summer 04 and positive earnings news, Salesforce.com seems poised to capture more of the enterprise market, including larger companies that it has not targeted in the past. Founded in 1999 by a former Oracle executive, Salesforce.com provides customizable CRM applications ...