Have you bump on this ‘Please Read What You Write’? Surely, you do! And we are always reading what we are writing that’s why we have our articles. It’s just that sometimes we think our ideas are okay. But when others will read it, it would be different for them. Just like when we are studying and then our teachers will ask that we need to write an essay. But when our essay will not full with the idea of that particular teacher, we got a grade of less to zero. Meaning our effort will be rejected.

And sometimes or oftentimes even if we are graduate now, we will experience some rejections as well.

I’m just so glad for others that they will accept those things we are making for them as long as the text that they want are present with our articles with the corresponding back links to their site. What matters most is the link and the anchor text that’s been placed properly. Somehow it will improve their rankings online and can help them promote their products and services.

IJP's Haven - Personal | March 31, 2009

Custom wine labels are nothing new as an idea but for many people, how simple and cheap it is to arrange for a personalized label is still something of a mystery! Today, printing wine labels is easy and affordable.

There are a wealth of internet sites offering personalization services for wine for special occasions such as weddings and holiday celebrations but what is also remarkably ignored, are the services available to personalize any bottle and not just a fancy wine bottle either – think soda for instance!

Personalizing your own custom wine label does require a good idea of what will work and what does not – personalization is a double edged sword which can easily lead to a presentation disaster no matter how good the wine inside actually is. The wine label for many is a certain symbol of the quality of the bottle which is why wine producers and distributors spend so much time and effort on creating a good looking bottle and label in the first place.

Check out the printing service offered and ensure that they provide help with the labels and design before you plunge into the personalization process. Many internet suppliers do little more than provide templates which are bland and uninspiring and certainly nothing in the form of custom designs to suit your own particular requirements; this results in many wine and champagne bottles looking like cast off prizes from a cheap fairground instead of the bespoke and customized entertaining experience that a good label will produce.

You should also look for help in selecting your wines; this is where the really good wine label suppliers will stand out from those who are simply dabbling in the market – personalization means putting something of yourself into the end product and this creates an opportunity to demonstrate taste and something unique however, it is also an opportunity to get it completely wrong which will equally reflect upon you.

IJP's Haven - Personal | March 23, 2009

My other main blog is not up right at this minute. The reason for that is I deleted it from my other web hosting. That’s because I want to transfer it with my host monster. Well, if I realized this like last December, that particular blog of mine is already set with host monster. But I did renew my hosting in that company which cost me almost 90 bucks. And it doesn’t matter if it cost me a lot, but I need to pull out that domain of mine so that I can set it up with my host monster. Hope I can have a full access of my domain soon. And that other hosting that I have in which I will not mention it here, I will not renew it next year. Instead I’ll just be upgrading my host monster into a dedicated IP Address since I do like their services.

IJP's Haven - Personal | March 23, 2009

You have just spent four months doing your homework to replace your aging call center and order management system: gathering user requirements, writing an RFP, getting capable vendors to bid on it, conducting demos and selecting the finalist. Yet there is one more activity that, if not done superbly, will shake management’s confidence that replacement of the old system will go smoothly. If you haven’t adequately studied how management at every level—from CEO to department managers—will get the information they’re used to having in order to run the business on an online, daily, weekly, monthly and year-end basis, your credibility could be in trouble.

Even when business analysts feel they have done an adequate job of determining user requirements, this area frequently gets cut short. There are a variety of reasons:

• In requirements and demos, users often spend too little time reviewing the entire system. Some feel they can do it in half a day. In reality, it is a two-day task—and even then you run the risk of not seeing everything.
• Vendors have stopped developing reports—yes, that’s right: no reports. “But we have online displays of data!” software vendors and less experienced users will say. Of course, when you go live with the new system, users line up at your door and want to know, “Where are those 10 important reports I had in the old system?”
• Then there’s the fact that management, while sponsoring the systems replacement effort, takes little time to see whether their most important data is in the system or find out how they will get it from the new system. The biggest area of systems deficiency is in the lack of plans and historical data. Many order management systems have been developed without history by product, category, list segment, total business by year, or any other criteria. Management therefore has adapted with its own spreadsheets and Access systems. How will they get the information in the formats they will need?
• Software vendors convince the users that they can develop the reports they need with Crystal Reports, a query language or a data warehouse tool the vendor has included in the purchase agreement. But here’s the problem: Do you know how many and which reports will need to be replaced, or how much effort this will take? Our experience in implementing order management and warehouse management systems is that there are literally hundreds of reports that have to be replicated in order to be comparable. Just this week, in working with a client we discovered there were over 200 key reports that would have to be replaced in some form.

Think about some of the reporting needs of various departments:

• How will Merchants get their merchandise performance reports? Do they require history? Plans? Vendor analysis? Category trending? Contribution to profit?
• Does your Marketing department require source code statistics? Do they need figures by channel performance in terms of demand, average order, etc.? How about conversion rates for first time to multi-buyers? Reactivation of inactive customer accounts? What about history and plans?
• Is there productivity analysis required for the Call Center? What about customer compliance and inquiry reporting from customer files?
• What data do you need to provide Fulfillment with reports about picker and packer productivity? How will they feed their departmental productivity and cost systems, which may be manual or spreadsheets?

You get the picture.

Here’s what you need to do: Be proactive in soliciting specifics on what analysis is required. Collect the requirements and determine where each analysis will come from in the new system. Get users to sign off on the new system, confirming that it meets their needs. Cost out the time and effort required to provide all of this and make it a key ingredient in your system conversion work plan.

I think you’ll find that reporting is an area of systems requirements on which many don’t spend enough time before going live.

Article written by Brian Barry, a Senior Consultant with F. Curtis Barry & Company, a multichannel operations and fulfillment consulting firm with expertise in multichannel systems, warehouse cost reduction, reducing call center costs, inventory, and benchmarking; Learn more online at: http://www.fcbco.com.

IJP's Haven - Personal | March 22, 2009

My cordless mouse has been blinking for a couple of days but in order for me to save for the battery, I need to wait for this to really stop working. For now, I’ll just have to ignore this red blinking light since this is still functional. Besides, that blinking can’t harm my lappy. But I will have to have two AA batteries ready beside my table just in case my mouse will quit working. By then, I’ll be having an instant battery replacement.

IJP's Haven - Personal | March 22, 2009