Tag Archives: business
Wholesale Distributors Meeting 21st Century Challenges
Expanding Services Margin Upside
Product margins vary for Wholesale Distributors, based on products, territories, and their own efficiencies. But clearly, service margins are usually much higher. Along with outsourcing, manufacturers are also closing branch offices and service depots. Businesses don’t want the head count or the challenges associated with the resource management of diverse and remote facilities, logistics, and people.
That represents the upside for the wholesale distributor! Local market knowledge, the strength and weakness of the product catalog, and insight can be provided into the types of services that customers need. Today, many brand companies clearly know that their channel partners are the ‘sales and service arms’ of their companies. And many have put large investments in place, from sales training to product installation, repair training and certification.
For call centre management, this capability can also be leveraged to support clients’ businesses. Again, instead of making the WD just a cost centre to manage customer interactions, it can become another service and a source of revenue.
Manufacturing services are playing a great part in the distributor’s business model. From light ‘kitting’ and assembly to custom value-added-reseller (VAR) services, the proximity to customer markets, again, allows the WD to open discussion on these higher margin activities. Once the WD is in the ‘manufacturing game,’ customer-specific services such as configuration management, pre-loaded software and installation can all be done.
Diversity and Multi-channel
A big challenge for the WD is managing diverse methods for customer sales and self-service options, often called multi-channel. This is the ability to provide a ‘single face to the customer’ regardless of their preferred shopping methoddirect sales, web, catalog, phone or showroom. Often, established customers use multiple channels. This is a huge issue if the processes, system and business tools can’t identify this customer and assure that all the appropriate services and agreements are instantly known. Does the sales person in the showroom know that this customer is entitled to a 30% discount? Does the system know that this customer, when ordering on-line, has higher priority when allocating scarce product? Can the 3rdparty warehouse have access to all the proper labeling and shipping information?
Foundationally, today’s WDs should be old pros at this type of challenge. Right?
Added to this are the complexity and diversity of the services, priorities, pricing, and ‘deals’ unique to each customer. In addition to providing transparency in sales and fulfillment, the WD’s business accounting software and billing system has to be precise, productive and transparent to the customer. Too often WDs are filled with paper tracking down pricing complaints, dealing with charge-back and settlements with customers, with no audit trail of transactions and service add-ons. Making the sale, only to lose margins in poor paperwork and ‘give backs’ to customers, who clearly did not really earn those discounts, is an all too familiar story. Diversity can cost. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
A Guide to Managed Dedicated Server Hosting and Its Benefits (Page 1 of 2)
Managed dedicated server hosting is when a third party company hosts your website for you via a dedicated server. That means no other sites are hosted on the same server and it also means the outside company take care of all server costs and maintenance. This is one of the best and most secure ways you can have a website hosted. Hosting is a vital part of having a website, without hosting the site won’t be online in fact. There are different choices available as to how your site is hosted, with benefits and a disadvantages of each. This article explains in more detail what managed dedicated server hosting is and the benefits of it.
Having a dedicated server is crucial if you run an online business, have websites that take payment information or have a website that is of vital importance to your business. On a dedicated server no one but you hosts a website on it. If a server is shared then multiple websites are hosted on the same server and multiple people have access to it. Not only can this make loading times quite slow but your own site could be affected by some other webmaster accessing the server and making alterations to their site. Viruses are even a risk as they can spread to other sites on a shared server. If you are a serious business or have multiple sites then shared server hosting should be avoided at all costs, unless finances are extremely tight. The benefits of having a shared server are financial – it is extremely cheap to host your site this way.
A dedicated server is not as cheap to have, but the security benefits outweigh the higher cost. By choosing managed dedicated server hosting as well as providing the server on which the websites are run, the company providing the service will also take care of maintenance tasks and ensure the server is working well and there are no technical problems through constant monitoring. Having a website go down due to network problems or some other technical hitch can be very problematic, especially if your business depends on the site. It is simply not worth taking any risks and managed dedicated server hosting eliminates those risks.
It is possible to look after your own servers. This of course carries costs and an additional task list. Having a server is more involved than simply owning the hardware, you need a data centre in which it sits. You can rent space in a nearby data centre instead of purchasing the equipment and installing a data centre of your own. This is known as colocation. You would be responsible for all maintenance, monitoring and general technical support.
You may not have considered setting up your own data centre but were instead thinking of a server rack or server cupboard. In an open plan office space, a server rack can be quite noisy and distracting. A server cupboard means the server is out of the way but may not meet the needs of an efficient system. Cooling in a data centre is a major factor, as is a clean power supply. Over heated servers and mains power spikes can severely impact your website and the average office space is not necessarily designed for these benefits. In an office, the internet access equipment, the routers, may also be on standard mains supply and so these too are at risk.