How to Reduce the Cost of

Transcription

1 why Management is critical to the Retail, Wholesale, and Supply Chain Bottom-Line Part One of a Three-Part Series: Reducing the Cost of Disclaimer of liability: While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this document, C2C assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. This not intended to be a legal document or a legal opinion. Copyright C2C info@c2c.com

2 Table of Contents Overview... 3 Employee Turnover makes more costly... 3 The Hidden Costs of Storage... 4 Information Management Helps Address the Challenge of Storage Costs... 5 Toc ABSTRACT Organizations are driven by the retail world is no exception. Companies who manage like the information asset it has become see substantial bottomline benefits over competitors who rely on insufficient strategies such as back-up or basic archiving. In Part One of this Series, we ll look at how unique challenges in these segments can increase a company s overall storage costs, and how information management systems can reduce those costs. 2

3 Overview drives the business for all organizations at all levels; the retail, wholesale, and supply sectors are no different. Companies with robust customer relationship management and multi-layered supplier management find their communications vehicle of choice is . Orders that were once faxed (to provide a hard copy and delivery confirmation) are now ed. Even when information systems are there to back-up any communications with customers or suppliers, contains data these systems don t: the conversation itself. is the unlikely corporate glue for disparate systems: an inventory management system might not integrate seamlessly with a supplier management system, but and the data attached to it transcends them all. is often the easiest place to look for data since, regardless of the solution, there s usually an that corresponds to any given activity. Employee Turnover makes more costly One of the hallmarks of these segments is a strong supplier-to-consumer relationship, whether they are online providers or a brick-and-mortar establishment, or part of the suppy chain. This is a very people-driven business: people interact with consumers, people address consumer issues, complaints, and concerns, people interact with suppliers, and people strategize what goods and services will resonate with consumers. With the prevalence of and online merchandising, much of this correspondance is now contained in . These segments are also prone to large employee turnover rates. The Hays Group, a global consulting management firm, found in 2012 that retailers reported a median turnover rate of 76% for part-time workers, a 33% increase from 2011, and that one in five retailers reported that employee turnover continues to increase. When you have high staff turnover, you are retiring large numbers of accounts on a recurring basis. Most companies hold this data for some period of time in the event of a legal dispute, yet many of these companies have inconsistent retention strategies and do not adhere to to a defensible deletion strategy for this data. This results in an unnecessary and costly build-up of data on corporate servers. The retained data of former employees is costly in two ways. First, a certain amount of this data needs to be retained for legal reasons and therefore occupies corporate server space. Second, retaining anything that isn t required, and failing to delete what was required when it s prudent to do so, occupies even more server space. storage often 3

4 consumes 45-60% of corporate servers: when 25% or more of that is the retained of former employees, cutting out fallow retention can allow savvy companies to delay expensive storage upgrades. This is a bottom-line operational savings. An Information Management system which incorporates policy-driven retention can automatically remove extraneous data once an expiration date has been reached, and can apply these rules on an consistent basis. data which needs to be retained, such as s relating to former employees, can automatically be moved to lower-cost secondary storage, again following sound, defensible policies, which is important in the event of legal action. The Hidden Costs of Storage As pointed out earlier, corporate servers are loaded with data much of it no longer needed or relevant. Storage may seem cheap in today s dollars, but it adds up quickly. A big culprit is personally-stored files called PST files. These are bulk files, containing numerous s, and are difficult for IT to manage, consuming ever-increasing amounts of storage when they wind up on corporate servers. Cloud storage offers some relief as there are no acquisition, maintenance, or back-up costs. However, there are some notable drawbacks, in particular security and performance. Security is outside the renter s control since they do not manage the servers, and performance is up to the cloud provider, since cloud resources are typically accessed remotely. An archiving and information management system is designed to address storage costs head-on by moving data to less costly secondary storage, such as the cloud, without breaking the end user experience and while maintaining centralized control over the data for investigation and discovery. Companies looking to implement these systems often must decide whether to implement an on-premise or cloud-based system, but a third option, called a hybrid solution, leverages a combination of on premise servers and cloud storage for optimized security, performance and cost - and still yields an overall reduction in costly primary storage of more than 70%. Chris D Orazi of Central Garden and Pet a nationwide leader in both garden and pet supplies, implemented a hybrid solution when he needed to alleviate a critical storage burden on Exchange but lacked the physical space to store the archives. This solution is the best of both worlds the elasticity of the cloud with the freedom and flexibility of an onpremise solution, said D Orazi. The on-premise server provides policy control of live and archive data, while the cloud storage options provide unlimited archive storage. 4

5 Information Management Helps Address the Challenge of Storage Costs As pointed out earlier, deploying an archiving and information management system has an easily-tracked, positive impact on storage costs. By deploying policy-driven retention strategies, companies can limit their long-term storage of non-relevant s and can minimize long-term storage costs of those they do retain. In industries with high employee turnover and large amounts of data, the savings quickly add up. 5