The Inovis Blog

Wegman’s put a New Generation Sales Call video on YouTube talking about leveraging data synchronization capability. Worth a view.

Every year fall brings a myrid of new colors and opportunities to see the forest for the trees. The diversity of foliage in New England and around the country provides scenic opportunities to explore and understand more about what’s out there that we miss on most days. We are often just way too busy in our day-to-day life to see the big picture as we are focused on the task at hand and not looking at the forest of opportunities which exist.

The New England and east coast conference schedule is diverse are well with conference up and down the eastern seaboard. The fall conference schedule is packed with industry groups or regional user groups the next 2 weeks not only in New England but also throughout the United States.

Opportunities abound this fall to spring around the country for conferences! Inovis just finished a great show with a business partner Infor this week and the team is on the road over the next couple of weeks as well. The fall schedule on the east coast Mid Atlantic Electronic Commerce (MAECOM) Users Group in PA, the joint x12 and WEDI meeting on health care in the DC area and the pending New England Electronic Commerce (NEECOM) group meeting on October 11, 2007.

Both MAECOM, NEECOM and the Real-time adjudication conference offer insights from industry experts and provide use cases for B2B best practices. A key part both of these conferences is to understand best practices from the field to accelerate B2B automation and the value delivered from automating your B2B communities.

The other main conference which may be of interest is the x12 Trimester meeting in Los Angeles, this is a great opportunity to find out what x12 is about and volunteer to drive improvements to standards and interoperability for trading communities.

As noted in a previous post, standards matter, whether its PIDX, CIDX, OAGIS or other standards such as RosettaNet there are multiple options and multiple meetings which you can go to and get a better understanding of your industry, B2B best practices and how to drive more value out of your B2B community. Find an event in your region to learn from your peers and better understand real-world opportunities to improve your B2B operations.

Saw a very good Aberdeen report on Trade Compliance priorities for 2007.  According to trade library - “Trade compliance is the process by which goods enter the United States in conformance with all U.S. laws and regulations.  It is the goal of the Customs Service to maximize trade compliance while facilitating the importation of legitimate cargo.”

The top 3 trade compliance initiatives reported by Best in Class companies are:
Improve total landed cost (TLC) calculations – 64%
Strengthen C-TPAT compliance – 55%
Actively use GTM knowledge to “engineer” lower total landed costs on products - 41%

Here are the savings that BMW saw according to the report:

Cost savings from automation:
• Shipping and storage costs of paper invoices eliminated with the introduction of electronic invoicing: earlier, paper invoices were shipped from Germany to US and then stored in warehouses. Now, German invoices are transmitted and stored electronically and can be printed on demand
• Eliminated the cost of manually processing C-TPAT documentation, including: first time application and reauthorization, sending questionnaires to suppliers and processing their responses, as well as mining/analyzing related documents database (the factory now has the ability to send questionnaires electronically, receive responses more rapidly, and sort/ filter the data to determine security risks)
• Employee time saved by eliminating manual data entry: from Jan 2004 to Oct 2006 the compliance department saved 1 full-time employee by re-directing freed up time to other tasks.
• Saved millions through better management and automation of foreign trade zone activities and reporting for preferential trade agreements (better visibility allowed more granular view and analysis of historical transactional data)

 What about you? Are you looking at trade compliance as a key issue for 2007?

Nicked the title from a Chris Houchens post, about the effectiveness of guerilla marketing, his point being you’re doing something, but does it make a difference? But I want to navigate another stream with Todd Ebert’s post on Bad Marketing.

Todd says press releases are a waste of time, nobody reads them and they’ve become nothing more than corporate navel gazing. Sour grapes? The post is dated May 12 (and his most recent) not exactly topical, but the point here is that it’s too easy to condemn an evolving process instead of growing along with it and using it creatively and effectively to provide real value.

(Note to self: Insert obvious analogy to the current state of EDI compliance.)

Certainly Web 2.0 and the demand for fresh content have diluted the waters. Every SEO player is throwing them down almost as fast as reality shows. But, let’s remember the most essential aspect of a press release (learned in Marketing 301) is that it be newsworthy.

More back to basics: A well-crafted message (including who, what, where, when, why & how) about a newsworthy event will get attention, drive traffic, increase brand awareness, expand social capital, and impact the bottom line. Put down the remote, heave yourself out of the recliner and just do it. (Thank you Nike!)

I wasn’t going to go here but Apple sold its one-millionth iPhone last Monday. This is four days after Steve Jobs set the newswires and the blogosphere on fire by offering store credits to the early adopters complaining over the price drop. If you’re keeping a scorecard, pencil in a PR homerun for Apple vendors.

Here’s help from Scott Baradell with eight things to avoid when writing a press release:

1. Vague claims like being a “leading provider” of this, that or the other.

2. Industry jargon abuse being overused and misused.

3. Business nonsense talk like: Paradigm shift. Mission critical. Crowdsourcing. (These are sweet, though, maybe a just one or two?)

4. Silly superlatives. Tone it down.

5. Bait and switch. This could come back to bite you.

6. Tortured topicality, the opposite being: Newsworthy. (Repeat as necessary.)

7. Off-brand wire distribution. There’s a reason those other services are free.

8. Clumsy e-mail distribution. Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, click: Delete all.

The Bottom Line: Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you’re in marcom, be alert and remember the basics when current events offer you killer content.