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Tag Archives: Market

Agility Robotics’ humanoid Digit robot helps itself to the logistics market

November 13, 2020   Big Data
 Agility Robotics’ humanoid Digit robot helps itself to the logistics market

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As the pandemic wears on, humanoid robots that can perform general tasks could become increasingly important. They can move heavy objects in warehouses, assist with last-yard deliveries, and potentially be involved in other tasks where low human-to-human contact is preferable for safety reasons.

Agility Robotics is one of the companies making these helper robots. The company, which was spun out of the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory at Oregon State University, first got broad attention last year when it began a pilot with Ford, delivering packages in concert with the car maker’s autonomous vehicles. And it’s capitalizing on fortuitous timing. When the pandemic hit, Agility Robotics had already turned from a lab project into a real company, and it was reaching a level of project maturity with its bipedal Digit robot. Now the company, fresh off of a $ 20 million funding round, is accelerating its quest to claim a chunk of the robot-powered material-handling and logistics market with additional partnerships and impending new versions of Digit.

A general-purpose robot

Sometimes when people say “robot,” it’s shorthand for automated machines like a robot arm that can sort rubbish or flip burgers. But Agility Robotics’ Digit is more in line with what a child usually imagines a robot to be: humanoid, with a head (sort of), torso, two arms, and two legs. Digit is an evolution of the company’s original robot, Cassie, which had two legs but no arms. As Agility Robotics CEO Damion Shelton quipped in an interview with VentureBeat, “Digit is the product we were always building; we just happen to be able to stop halfway up the body and sell the legs separately — which was Cassie — and then once you complete the upper body, that was Digit.”

Some robots, especially those of the non-humanoid variety, are single-purpose. That is, they do only one thing, ideally with extreme precision and efficiency. By contrast, Digit is a general-purpose robot, which is to say that it’s designed to be able to perform a variety of non-specific tasks reasonably well.

Shelton illustrated the difference. “Let’s imagine you have a business that has a conventional high-speed conveyor belt, and you have a task which is, say, you have to shove a packet off that conveyor belt. If you’re doing that 24 hours a day at superhuman speeds, there’s really no reason not to fully automate it,” he said. That’s a case where a single-purpose robot is ideal.

“The reverse example is: Imagine you’re at my house. I get firewood delivered once a year. I couldn’t possibly use a [firewood-stacking] robot 24/7. And so something that can do firewood loading and unloading in my woodshed once a year, and then infill other tasks as the duty cycle demands, is more useful,” Shelton said.

By default, Digit ships with a sort of general “intelligence,” where it can stand up, it knows how to move through environments without bumping into things, and it can pick up objects. It doesn’t know how to, say, drive a truck. But Shelton says its general capabilities are versatile and can serve a variety of needs.

“There’s not actually a ton of difference between carrying tomatoes in a field in California and carrying a box up to my doorstep,” he said. There are obviously some differences, like the climate, the specifics of knowing how not to step on plants, and so on. “But the differentiation is really at that application layer, much more so than it is at the core ergonomics layer.”

What comes next

Although Shelton alluded to upcoming partnerships with other companies, for the moment, he’s mum on the details. As is often the case, there are non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in place as deals become final and all parties agree to the timing of announcements. The Ford pilot was a huge get for the small company, but Shelton wasn’t able to give any on-the-record updates on how that project is going. Ford did not respond to VentureBeat’s request for comment on the matter. But beyond that, “Ford is not the only partner we have,” Shelton said. “We’re working in areas that I think would not be surprising to anybody […] who is looking at material handling, logistics — those kinds of applications.”

More than anything, though, the recent funding marks a pivot for Agility Robotics as it moves beyond R&D and toward actual commercial deployments. “The plan had always been to sell Cassie as an R&D device and Digit as the commercial product,” Shelton said.

Shelton said that the company is already designing the next two versions of Digit (although the second one may have a different moniker when it arrives). They’re on approximately a two-year product cycle, meaning that the second one is about four years out.

The first update is more about maximizing Digit’s existing hardware capabilities than anything else. Shelton likens it to the debuts of the iPhone and App Store — the hardware came out first, and then the second wave of the product brought the App Store and unlocked so much of what the hardware could do. The innovation was in the applications that took advantage of the hardware. That’s where Agility Robotics is in Digit’s development and deployment. “We’re excited to be boring for the next version of [Digit], which lets us focus on the software more than the hardware,” Shelton joked.

The company offers customers an API, and they can use local or web-based interfaces to send commands to Digit, or even write low-level code.

The next version of Digit is yet to be defined, but Agility Robotics knows how it wants to get there, at least. “There’s the ‘unknown unknowns’ and the ‘known unknowns,’ and you can really only design toward the known unknowns,” Shelton said. “So the [second Digit] is really going to be a roll-up of all of what we’ve learned with the partners that we’re deploying with over the next couple years, and is intended to sort of backfill things that can’t be changed just with software improvements.” He didn’t elaborate on what some of those potential hardware upgrades would be, but he did toss out the example of adding fingers to Digit’s grippers if a customer needed it to, for example, sort high volumes of mail.

Ironically, building and shipping a product that can potentially solve pandemic-related challenges during a pandemic is not easy. “One of the big procedural changes that we’ve had to go through, much sooner than we probably otherwise would have, is really thinking through Digit as something that you can unbox and use as a totally independent customer,” Shelton said. Before the pandemic, if a customer needed some assistance getting a Digit up and running, an engineer could just hop on a plane and be on site in a few hours; that’s just not an option these days. That forced Agility Robotics to push for product maturity, enabling out-of-the-box deployment, with more urgency.

The competition

While Agility Robotics appears locked into two iterations of its core robot over the next four years, a chief competitor in the logistics market, Boston Dynamics, is diversifying. It’s working on Pick and Handle, which are designed to perform tasks like moving boxes in a warehouse; Spot, a modular quadruped robot (read: robot dog); and the humanoid biped Atlas robot. Atlas competes directly with Digit, but Boston Dynamics isn’t planning to commercialize it yet.

Boston Dynamics has had multiple parent companies over the years — Google, then Softbank, and now potentially Hyundai. Like Ford, Hyundai is working on autonomous vehicles. If Hyundai secures the deal, both automakers will own or will be partnering with general-purpose logistical helper robots, too.

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It’s Still a Young CRM Market

August 21, 2020   CRM News and Info

The IDC CRM market share numbers are in for 2019 and for the seventh consecutive year Salesforce leads the pack, this time with 18.4 percent of the market. Other big vendors trailing the leader include, SAP 5.3 percent, Oracle 5.2 percent, Microsoft 3.7 percent, and Adobe 3.6 percent.

The list is impressive, but the numbers are absolutely binky after 25 years of competition. The runners-up have a combined share of 17.8 percent, still less than that of Salesforce.

Most interesting is that the top five vendors, including Salesforce, add up to an unimpressive 36.2 percent. That means the majority of the market is made up of CRM vendors that we may know well, but that don’t hit the radar.

Others in the Field

I’m thinking about companies like Zoho, a global provider of front and back office technology that’s quirky enough to evade most definitions of CRM or ERP, yet provides just-right solutions to small and medium companies at price points that the majors avoid.

I’m also thinking about Siebel which, despite the fact that it was absorbed by Oracle a long time ago, still has a big installed base — and Oracle recently announced that support for the product has been extended to 2030.

Finally, just to mention a third, there’s Creatio (formerly bpm’online), a company that focuses on the processes of CRM and not just the data.

But 36.2 percent is hardly the stuff that makes an oligarchy, or a simple monopoly, and it offers all of us hope. Regardless of what you think of the majors, and full disclosure, they’ve all paid me at some point to provide research and analysis, they aren’t dominant, and the other vendors are still adding considerable value.

Quick segue, it’s entirely possible that IDC’s definition of what makes a CRM company is overly broad and it’s also possible that many large companies built their own CRM or greatly customized a version of Siebel or some other product they bought a long time ago. It’s also possible I’m immune to COVID and just not aware of it. But none of those is probable.

The one insight from this research that I find really interesting is just how diffuse the market is. There are still plenty of niches where other vendors can set up shop and do pretty well. But I also wonder how long this can go on.

Salesforce’s Grand Design

The top five vendors all have buckets of cash, in part because they have portfolio businesses that cater to a variety of other markets like databases, operating systems, and ERP. So they aren’t as dependent on the CRM market as Salesforce. Also, the addition of analytics to the CRM record keeping systems embraced by the majors sets a high bar for the rest, most of whom are clearing it.

If you’re wondering about market consolidation and the emergence of a dominant supplier, then the smart money would obviously be on Salesforce, but the smart money was once on Siebel too. I think Salesforce is going in a different direction. It is axiomatic that Salesforce is the CRM leader and is likely to remain so. However, if they get to dominance, as in market share at or above 50 percent, it will be inconsequential for them.

The company’s strategy for quite some time has been to invent new products that will be attractive to its installed base so that it can re-sell to its friends. The strategy has resulted in many new products and additions to the core CRM; like social media, process support, CPQ, BI, analytics and its development platform. Each new addition gives Salesforce more potential a little further from its core CRM business, however the company has always been strategic in its thinking to ensure full compatibility with its core.

Salesforce is in the process of becoming the Swiss Army Knife of software development. Its platform is at home developing systems of intelligence for all sorts of businesses, from finance to healthcare, and that’s a major reason that I’ve begun talking about the CRMification of society. The systems that we rely on to run our lives all seem to have a CRM root. Increasingly they are database apps surrounded by intelligence, making recommendations and anticipating our next moves.

My Two Bits

So believe it or not, I am impressed and somewhat relieved at IDC’s newest numbers. They show a market still in its early days and still growing with multiple, well-funded competitors, and consumers that are still skeptical enough to keep a large group of credible companies in pursuit.

At some point we might have to grapple with the idea that mom and pop businesses aren’t likely to adopt CRM, or at least the CRM now available. But that’s for some point in the future. For now, there’s still a lot of low hanging fruit.
end enn Its Still a Young CRM Market

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.


Denis%20Pombriant Its Still a Young CRM Market
Denis Pombriant is a well-known CRM industry analyst, strategist, writer and speaker. His new book, You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It, is now available on Amazon. His 2015 book, Solve for the Customer, is also available there.
Email Denis.

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Can Your Business Adapt to a Shifting Market?

May 26, 2020   TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Now, more than ever, business agility is no longer a nice to have. It’s a necessity. The ability to very quickly alter how your business operates and engages with customers is fast becoming a key business tenant. Is your business enabled to adapt to changes in the market quickly? Find out in this on-demand webinar: Business Agility Starts with a Connected Business.

Businesses are increasingly putting data and software at the core of their business models. More and more businesses are operating with agile algorithms rather than documented processes. So it makes sense that in order to operate with agility, organizations must be able to break down the silos in their organizations and connect the software and the data that exists everywhere. Thus for today’s business, agility starts with a connected business. 

Roadblocks to creating a connected business

Businesses often have one of many institutional roadblocks in their way to making them more agile. For example, as they evolve towards hybrid cloud environments, tap new data sources, connect new devices, and engage customers through new digital channels the resulting architectures become very complex and diverse. Yet most businesses don’t plan for connectivity. It’s usually left as an afterthought which leads to a high degree of technical debt. And a spaghetti mess of connectivity. 

Your journey to a connected business

To begin your journey towards agility, you need a holistic approach. It begins with people. You must empower users across your enterprise to create their own connections quickly and with higher quality. You need to embrace an architecture that is built with modern technologies. One that scales fast, and is more flexible to adapt and evolve. With a scalable and flexible platform, your business will be able to adapt quickly as new needs arise in the market.

Learn how you can empower users and embrace a modern data integration solution to connect your business easily and quickly in this webinar. Also, hear about how three TIBCO customers leveraged our Connect solutions to adapt to new environments and create immersive experiences for their customers.

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How Fast are you Responding to Shifts in the Market?

May 4, 2020   TIBCO Spotfire
TIBCO OperateFaster scaled e1587662829321 696x365 How Fast are you Responding to Shifts in the Market?

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Every enterprise faces disruption from the rapid rise and potential impact of data. As customer demands become more complex, brand loyalty is not easily won; it goes to businesses that provide the most efficient and engaging experiences. And frictionless customer experiences come from ensuring that all of your systems are connected and working together. What are you doing to provide that experience and fast? 

In this new ebook, we walk you through how TIBCO is helping enterprise businesses transform the customer experience, operate and adapt faster, and uncover opportunities and reduce risk.

Creating customer experiences that delight

Advances in technology make for better-informed customers with higher expectations. Digital natives today expect fast and efficient business engagements via the most convenient channel, usually their smartphone. But simply enabling a channel isn’t enough. You must also provide a differentiated user experience that helps build brand loyalty—one that delivers an excellent experience through the seamless integration of your digital and physical assets.

In the ebook, read how Desigual created an unlimited shopping experience for its customers by empowering retail staff with up to date information, giving customers real-time visibility into stock and creating a virtual dressing room assistant. Also, learn how Accorhotels streamlined its complex, legacy IT environment to provide its customers with a harmonious customer experience. And, read how JetBlue empowered it’s 21,000 crewmembers to use a unified analytics dashboard so they all have the same information to serve customers with the most accurate and up-to-date information. You can also learn how Aeroporti di Roma integrated the numerous facets of airport logistics—including passenger services, retail, food and beverage—into one unified airport ecosystem, leading to better passenger experiences and consecutive top ratings for the airport.

Operating and adapting faster

Creating a flexible digital architecture that can respond quickly to new market forces is key. Customers, financial institutions, partners, regulators, shareholders—each demand that your business quickly meet their expectations. It’s a challenge that requires operating faster, leaner, smarter, and with more customer-focus and flexibility.

In the ebook, read how CargoSmart reduced fuel consumption by 3.5% by operating smarter. Also read how industry giants NASA and T-Mobile are delivering projects to market faster with TIBCO integration solutions. These customers adopted a cloud-native integration solution so they could automate processes and have real time access to their data. All of these companies can now operate and adapt faster, are smarter, leaner, and more flexible than the competition. 

Responding, not just reacting, to market forces

Does the speed of technology today leave you wondering if you’re missing opportunities? Is it leaving your digital business vulnerable to unfamiliar or new risks? You must be able to sense and respond to events occurring in real time with intelligence, agility, and scale. Mitigate risk before it takes form and seize these opportunities before the competition does. 

This eBook shares the successes of TIBCO customers that know the importance of responding to events with speed and confidence. Read how Citibank Asia can now get new credit cards to customers in two days when it used to take two weeks before TIBCO. Learn how Dutch Railways, the biggest rail transportation company in the Netherlands, can now monitor over 800 trains in real time and act quickly when they anticipate issues. 

Download this ebook now for some inspirational stories that you can apply to your digital business and see how you can better respond to shifting markets with the help of TIBCO integration solutions.

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Google and Facebook: Digital ad market is avoiding coronavirus disaster

May 1, 2020   Big Data
 Google and Facebook: Digital ad market is avoiding coronavirus disaster

(Reuters) — Reports of the demise of the digital advertising market due to the coronavirus outbreak appear exaggerated as the tech giants dominating the online ads business, Google and Facebook, said this week they saw early signs that the worst could be over. Their remarks countered Wall Street expectations of a devastation of the market as hard-hit brands in travel and autos, traditionally big ad spenders, have pulled marketing dollars and as small businesses, the lifeblood of big tech companies’ businesses, have shut down.

At Google’s parent, Alphabet, first-quarter total revenue grew 13% from the previous year to $ 41.2 billion, while Facebook‘s ad sales rose 17% to $ 17.44 billion. They issued first-quarter results that factored in only two weeks of the widespread stay-at-home orders in the United States. But both companies also reassured investors that revenue for the first three weeks of April showed signs of stability, following lower revenue in March.

Alphabet, Facebook, and Snap credited direct response ads, or ads that solicit a direct action, such as clicking a link, using a coupon code or downloading mobile games, for propping up sales during the pandemic. Such ads help advertisers get the most for their money by encouraging immediate response from audiences and are easier to measure, since brands can see how many people clicked on a link or took an action after seeing the ad.

Brand advertising that is used to spread awareness and name recognition for a company, but whose effectiveness is often more difficult to measure, was harder hit. Alphabet said on Tuesday brand advertising declined on YouTube in mid-March, when the pandemic accelerated in the United States.

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Ad prices drop when marketers lower their spending and demand for digital ads decline, and direct response advertisers have been taking advantage of that, said David Campanelli, chief investment officer at ad agency Horizon Media. “This will likely continue through 2Q as we expect pricing to remain low for the foreseeable future,” he said.

Facebook executives said on Wednesday they expected direct response advertising to continue to drive ad sales and that the coronavirus pandemic only reinforced the importance of the strategy. Still, Facebook was cautious, given economists are forecasting a global downturn in the second quarter and “if history were a guide, would suggest the potential for an even more severe advertising industry contraction,” said David Wehner, Facebook’s chief financial officer, during an earnings call.

Alphabet warned that the second quarter could be difficult because the early April trends may not hold. Snap, which owns messaging app Snapchat, said it would shift resources on its ad sales team to serve direct response advertisers better, due to the success of the category.

But Twitter alarmed investors on Thursday as it pointed to a 27% decline in ad revenue as a sign of what the company has seen so far in April. Twitter’s ad business is heavily event-driven and “the suspension of major sporting leagues in March will have hurt its bottom line and will continue to do so as long as social distancing and stay-at-home measures remain in place,” said Jasmine Enberg, senior analyst at research firm eMarketer.

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Ecommerce leader helps Mexican brands tap into $12B+ market opportunity

October 12, 2019   NetSuite

Ibushak, a Mexican ecommerce provider, is using Oracle NetSuite to help Mexican brands unlock new revenue opportunities and meet changing customer expectations. With NetSuite, Ibushak has streamlined financials, optimized inventory management and gained a comprehensive view into its core business processes so that it can personalize the customer experience and drive brand loyalty.

Founded in 2004 by brothers Mauricio and Salomon Bouzali, Ibushak is focused on making it easier for Mexican brands to conduct business online. The company currently works with more than 300 brands in Mexico and is tapping into a thriving industry, which is expected to reach $ 12.77 billion by 2023. To meet increasing demand that has seen its business grow by 120 percent in the last 4 years, Ibushak needed a unified business platform that could automate processes and scale to support its future growth. After careful evaluation, Ibushak selected NetSuite over Microsoft Dynamics and SAP.

“Our father had a successful 30-year career in the Mexican retail industry and taught us a lot, but at the time the industry was just scratching the surface,” said Mauricio Bouzali, co-founder and CEO, Ibushak. “In a single platform, NetSuite gives us the visibility, control and agility we need to streamline operations, drive customer satisfaction and enhance decision making. NetSuite will continue to support us in our journey as we grow well beyond the 300 brands and 62,000 products we have today.”

NetSuite has enabled Ibushak to take advantage of an integrated platform to automate and centralize key business functions including financials, order management and inventory management systems across its eight different business units. With a unified view into its core business functions, Ibushak has been able to provide its customers with the insights required to increase satisfaction and drive brand loyalty. By eliminating manual data entry with online orders, NetSuite has enabled Ibushak to more than double the number of orders shipped without decreasing service level agreements with its customers. In addition, Ibushak has enhanced decision making through increased visibility into financials.

“Technology has transformed the retail industry and consumers now expect things to happen seamlessly on their own terms, whenever and however they want,” said Gustavo Moussalli, LAD senior director, Oracle NetSuite. “Ibushak is helping brands operating in Mexico meet these changing customer expectations and unlock significant new revenue streams. With NetSuite, the Ibushak team will be able to focus on helping brands reach and engage customers in new ways as their business continues to grow.”

About Ibushak
Ibushak delivers the expertise and infrastructure to help companies of any size sell their products and services on the largest ecommerce platforms in Mexico. It also has its own online marketplace, ibushak.com. The company provides an end-to-end solution for ecommerce — handling everything from digital marketing to warehousing and fulfillment.

About Oracle NetSuite
For more than 20 years, Oracle NetSuite has helped organizations grow, scale and adapt to change. NetSuite provides a suite of cloud-based applications, which includes financials / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), HR, professional services automation and omnichannel commerce, used by more than 18,000 customers in 203 countries and dependent territories.

For more information, please visit https://www.netsuite.com.

Follow NetSuite’s Cloud blog, Facebook page and @NetSuite Twitter handle for real-time updates.

About Oracle
The Oracle Cloud offers complete SaaS application suites for ERP, HCM and CX, plus best-in-class database Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from data centers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), please visit us at oracle.com.

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How to Best Market a Retail Business

August 20, 2019   OnContact
customer experience 1 1024x842 How to Best Market a Retail Business

Whether you work in retail or are a consumer, the retail business is one that most of us deal with on a weekly or even daily basis. Marketing in the retail realm has changed over the years thanks to the online shopping takeover. Consumers mostly know what they are looking for and marketers often have trouble trying to encourage shoppers to purchase things that are not on their shopping list.

An additional problem is being stagnant when you do begin your business. It is a tricky market and being ahead of the curve is essential. Marketers have to learn the ways to best market to their audience, but how?

What is Retail Marketing?

Before we get into the ways to best market with the retail world, let’s give a quick description on what exactly retail marketing is:

  • Retail marketing is the process by which retailers promote awareness and interests of their businesses and the products and services they provide all in an effort to generate or increase sales from their customer base.

Now let’s talk about the different ways retail businesses can or should market their business.

  1. Focus on how to sell what your business sells

Being in the retail business naturally relies itself to selling items, but you cannot rest solely on that to help your business get by. What is your business known for? Are there specialty items that can only be found there? Or is your particular product the most popular? Knowing what makes your business important and/or special allows for you to then zone in on how to sell those items. Separating your business from others with a great customer experience, automatically places your business in a different playing field. Your store items may be able to be found in any store, but great customer service is hard to find and isn’t lost among customers.

  1. Give consumers a reason to shop your business

Continuing from our first tip, you must give your customers a reason to shop your business. Whether it is stellar customer service or specialty products, something about your brand and business needs to stand out above the others. Having exclusive events, including special sales on discounted items can gain interests. Marketing those special events through promotional emails and social media campaigns.

  1. Motivate your customer base

Motivating your customers to take action can result in an increase in website visits, sales and creates the potential for your client base to increase. But who should business motivate their customers? Taking advantage of holidays, which natural creates an atmosphere for shopping, is the perfect time to promote action amongst customers. Marketing special promotional events, not only alerts your customers it encourages customers to spend money because there is a special sale taking place. Marketing is really important here because using specific language can help intrigue customers and encourage them to spend time and money on your business.

Bonus: How Customer Relationship Management Software Helps

WorkWise CRM software can help businesses within the retail industry. The software not only helps businesses with their daily operations, but helps to build and increase the business/ client relationship. Here are some of the things a business can achieve with the help of a CRM software in place.

  • Segmentation – CRM helps users gather information on your customers. That can range from their contact information to items purchase and the times they have contacted your business. This information can be used to better market and customized information toward your consumer base.
  • Purchases – Customer Relationship Management software keeps record of customer purchases as well. Knowing what customers have bought and how much of it, allows for your to market toward them if similar or exact items that they have purchased become part of promotional sale events.
  • Creates Brand Loyalty – Retail and CRM work well together because it creates opportunities to scope out your most loyal customers. Through that, you can help build strong brand loyalty and even use your most vocal customers (those who may leave frequent comments on social media/leaving product review) as branding advocates.

The retail industry is one that constantly changes, just like marketing. And with those changes, businesses must constantly work on ways to keep their business relevant through clever marketing campaigns, which involves knowing just who your consumer base is. CRM software helps you in the area and can also assist with your marketing efforts.

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The Making of a Pop Star: How Preferred Popcorn Earned Half the US Market

May 22, 2019   NetSuite
img 3589copy The Making of a Pop Star: How Preferred Popcorn Earned Half the US Market

Posted by Barney Beal, Content Director

Americans eat 13 billion quarts of popped popcorn per year – that’s 42 quarts for every person in the United States, according to the Popcorn Board. It’s a wonderfully wholesome and economic food, the website says, evidenced by the fact that even during the Great Depression, popcorn sales increased, a likely effect of its debut in movie theaters around that time.

Bolstering popcorn’s reputation as a wholesome, economic food is one of the missions of Andrea Plucker, the third generation of her family working in the popcorn business. Plucker grew up next to the Chapman, Neb.-based processing facility that has now become the hub of Preferred Popcorn. More than 20 years ago, community farmers who were expert popcorn growers came together to purchase the plant, looking to bring something different to a saturated popcorn market.

Today, the 100% farmer-owned company provides more than half of the kernels popped at US-based movie theaters.

“We’re first and foremost farmers. We want to make sure we have the very best in seed genetics and the most effective conservation and “green” farming practices,” said Plucker, Preferred Popcorn’s Director of Marketing. “We’re also looking at how we can offer both organic and conventional popcorn, as a very healthy, wholesome, allergen-free, non-GMO and fun snack to more consumers.”

It’s an impressive business journey for a company founded by four farmers in 1997. Facing a crowded US market, Preferred Popcorn started by selling its product overseas in places like Indonesia, moving into North America by way of Mexico, where it quickly garnered a reputation for exceptional service.

In just a decade, it had become a major supplier for 40 different countries, and began to eye strategic acquisitions to gain a stronger foothold in the US market. In 2010, it added an additional processing facility in Indiana, in 2012 bought a Kentucky-based popcorn company, and five years later brought on a Missouri-based business that enabled it to sell organic kernels.

By 2016, the business was selling more than 12 different varietals of seed – all of which met very specific customer requirements in terms of moisture, color, kernel size and more. Inventory spanned 50 farms across seven different states, as well as international growers who produced the product for sale in their home countries. What’s more, the business at that time had more than 400 customers, but maintained early customer service processes that allowed its clients to place very customized orders to meet their unique business goals.

Amidst that landscape, Preferred Popcorn had no ERP system. Excel spreadsheets held all of its inventory information on what was stored in grain bins across seven states – tracking a popcorn seed supply totaling hundreds of millions of pounds. The business couldn’t look to any central location to be more accurate in terms of figuring out purchasing and growing requirements.

Adding another layer of difficulty was the fact that that all inventory must be planned and contracted in bulk prior to the spring planting season. While popcorn is a fairly shelf stable crop, organic popcorn can’t be held for a long period of time, and conventional kernels can’t be held indefinitely. Without visibility into exactly what they had and where, over and under-purchasing inventory was an easy, and costly, mistake to make.

“It was overwhelming to say the least,” said Brenda Budzinski, Preferred Popcorn’s Director of Finance. “I was concerned about that lack of control over the inventory.”

Budzinski, who joined the business in 2016, knew her first order of business would be helping move off QuickBooks and Excel. She helped lead the business through the selection and implementation of NetSuite, which it picked over Infor and Microsoft Dynamics largely because of the unique SuiteSuccess implementation methodology, which included on-site support, plus a fixed rate and timeline that couldn’t be matched by those competitors. With the SuiteSuccess methodology, the business went live with finance, inventory management and CRM functionality in 90 days, launching in August of 2018, a crucial deadline to meet for the upcoming fall harvest.

Preferred Popcorn gained a single view of item, order and customer data to replace QuickBooks and a myriad of Excel spreadsheets, and gained the ability to easily identify buying trends, surpluses and optimize product promotion.

“It’s really helped give (the business) visibility into what they need to be growing and what areas, what locations, need to have a certain variety than another location, and to see what kind of carryover they have,” Budzinski said. “That’s been a big improvement in efficiency and cost savings.”

With streamlined operations and analysis capabilities, Preferred Popcorn now maintains the industry’s highest customer retention rate.

“There were so many points of visibility that were available almost instantly. It really made a huge difference on my team,” Plucker said. “We went from very limited visibility to being able to see which products were shipping and at what price points and to which locations as well as monitoring and comparing customer pull rates. NetSuite allowed us to ask better questions and make more strategic contact when customers weren’t pulling on trend.”

Today, the US market comprises more than half of Preferred Popcorn’s total sales, as it boasts 500 customers across 65 countries. The business has time to devote attention to industry leadership in both agronomy and advancing farming techniques overseas, as well as expanding direct to consumer sales as it aims to convey popcorn’s value as an allergen-free snack.

NetSuite will scale to enable a possible direct to consumer expansion. It also provides the business with access to information and efficiencies that allow it to spend time on its overriding mission of spreading popcorn’s promise. That mission encompasses evangelizing the health benefits for consumers, and the benefits the popcorn economy can bring to places like India, where some 400 farmers, many of them women, plant seeds by hand and grow for the Indian market, or in Mexico, where it works to pay its employees a living wage.

“We are deeply focused on bringing quality and integrity to everything that we do,” Plucker said.

Posted on Tue, May 21, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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Conducting Market Research with Limited Resources

May 10, 2019   CRM News and Info
Market Research Conducting Market Research with Limited Resources

Market research is the key to learning what your target customers want, how to deliver the best solutions, and stay ahead of competitors. Regardless of the size of your business, however, research activities — such as gathering focus groups or performing a census — can be costly, time-consuming and hard to justify, especially if you’re simply looking for a quick and simple answer.

Thankfully, in this digital age, we marketers have access to plenty of tools that allow us to circumvent traditional research methods to gather the information we need to be successful. Many of our most pressing business questions are often times a quick Google search and few clicks away — if we know what to look for and where to search.  

As part of our mission to help marketers do more with less, today we’re going to share a few tricks you can use to conduct market research with limited resources. The following methods and tools will help you gather important customer insights without breaking the bank.

Determine Your Market Size and Characteristics

Knowing your market size and characteristics is critical to the success of any business plan and should be the first thing you determine before you move on to other research endeavors. This information is important because it helps you measure the potential for business growth and, therefore, determines how you approach most of your business efforts.

Going from door to door to figure out who your target customers are is an impossible task for almost any business. Luckily, the US Census Bureau has performed much of that work for us and offers some of the information they’ve gathered for free through their website. Here, you can find several tools to help you determine size, demographics, and other important audience characteristics. An advantage of this method is you can run customized reports to gather specific information that is important to your business goals, instead of rummaging through stats you don’t need.  

Ask Your Customers What They Want

If you already have knowledge of your customer base and size, the next step in your market research journey is to get to know your customers on a deeper level. The best and most effective way of determining what your customers want and need is to simply ask them.

Surveys are an easy and effective way to collect answers from your customers and are now easier to distribute than ever before. Tools like Google Forms allow you to create your own questionnaire and collect data in a centralized location. You can directly email the survey to your customers or distribute it on your social channels to cast a wider net.

If you’re working with a marketing automation tool like Act-On, you can forgo a traditional survey and create landing pages with targeted offers to help you collect key information over time. This method can be even more effective than surveys because it provides customers an incentive — such as a key resource or content piece — for providing you with their information. Another benefit of using forms to collect information is that it automatically integrates with your CRM, so you can store these insights to give to your sales team when the time comes to close a deal.

Take Advantage of Google Analytics

If you think Google Analytics is only intended to help you measure and track performance, you’re not leveraging this platform to its fullest. Certain features within this tool can also improve your understanding of how your customers think and what they want.

To start, looking at search pages allows you to analyze which content is attracting and resonating with your customers. In addition, examining search terms gives you a better sense of how your audience is looking for information on your website — providing you the insights you need to speak their language.

Why is this piece of research important to your market research efforts? While you may already offer a product or service your customers want, there might be room to improve your messaging and keywords so your customers can find these materials more easily.

Monitor Social Media for Hashtags

According to Statista, we can expect to see 2.77 billion social media users in 2019 (1). Although not all of these individuals are your customers, this numbers tells us you can expect a large percentage of your customer base to be active on various social networking channels.

In addition to providing a channel where you can easily connect with customers, social media platforms also house useful information that can enhance your market research efforts. Most social media platforms provide you with key demographic information so you can know who your target audience is on each. Furthermore, the widespread use of hashtags makes it easy to analyze what is trending with your target customers. Platforms such as Instagram even allow you to gain insight into how often certain hashtags are used so you can track your potential reach.  

Check Out What’s Trending on the Internet

Google is the central hub most consumers use to search for information before making a final decision. Much to our advantage, Google is generous to share some of the insights collected through their search engine via tools such as Google Trends. In addition to enabling you to identify what is trending, this useful tool lets you compare search terms and even see how they perform by subregion. This feature is particularly handy if you’re trying to pick an option that will best suit your audience based on their location.

Determining Next Steps

Now that you’ve gathered your market insights, it’s time to put them to use. Implement what you’ve learned to update your goal metrics, customer personas, and business plan. The main benefit of these tools being free is that they enable you to make performing market research a consistent effort, ensuring that you always stay on top of new trends in your industry so you can revise your overall business efforts accordingly.

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What’s Important to Investors in a Credit Score? Leading Secondary Market Participants Weigh In

April 24, 2019   FICO
Screen Shot 2019 04 19 at 3.05.20 PM What’s Important to Investors in a Credit Score? Leading Secondary Market Participants Weigh In

I had the chance to attend the Structured Finance Industry Group’s annual conference in Las Vegas, where SFIG’s members, including securities investors in a range of industries — from mortgage to auto to commercial lending — gather to discuss the latest and greatest in securitization. During the conference, FICO also took the opportunity to survey these investors about how they use credit scores to evaluate loans, what factors they want to see included in scores, and what makes them trust one score over another.

Here’s what I learned:

The FICO Score is the most trusted metric for loan quality.

 Nearly half of respondents (45 percent) said the FICO® Score was the most useful criteria in evaluating the quality of loans for secondary market investments, the most of any criteria for analyzing a loan. Loan-to-Value Ratio (34 percent) was second, and Debt-to-Income Ratio (10 percent) was third.

FICO has been the independent, trusted leader in credit scoring for decades. Investors continue to trust the FICO® Score more than any other credit risk factor as it has demonstrated historical performance over market cycles. Historical data supports investors in building robust prepayment and default models.

Investors want to see new data used for generating credit scores.

More than 90 percent of respondents said the inclusion of checking and saving account data to a credit score would be helpful in evaluating a pool of loans. With the new UltraFICO™ Score, a pilot initiative between FICO, Finicity and Experian, consumers can contribute their checking, savings and money market accounts to enhance the predictiveness of their credit score based on indicators of sound financial behavior, including:

  • Length of time accounts have been open
  • Recency and frequency of bank transactions
  • Evidence of consistent cash on hand
  • History of positive account balances

 Independence in credit scoring is essential.

Likewise, more than 90 percent of investors said it was very or somewhat important that credit score developers are independent from the credit reporting agencies. A majority (51 percent) called it very important, while another 42 percent said it was somewhat important.

FICO is an independent data analytics company. For decades, lenders have trusted the reliability and independence of the FICO®Score to provide a robust and accurate measure of predicting consumer credit risk.

Investors don’t trust scores without robust minimum scoring criteria.

Only 7 percent of respondents would be very confident in a credit score with a one-month credit history, while 42 percent said they would be somewhat confident and 51 percent would have no confidence. Similarly, more than 60 percent would have no confidence in a credit score that leveraged credit bureau data that had not been updated in the last 24 months.

For information on how to join the Secondary Market Portal please email us at ABSinfo@fico.com.

This online automated survey was conducted at the Structured Finance Industry Group in Las Vegas in February 2019.

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