Tag Archives: process

5 Signs You Need to Upgrade Your POS System

POS SystemPOS systems – or point-of-sale systems – are the hardware and software systems that you’d use to collect payment from your customers. POS systems have become much more sophisticated over the years, and many carry the features you need that allow you to input orders, manage inventory, track your staff when they clock in or out, print guest checks or invoices, and process reports.

If you’ve been in business for a long time – or if you long for the ‘ka-ching’ of the old fashioned cash register – you may need to modernize your payment processing system. There’s a reason those things sell for thousands of dollars on eBay: they’re antiques. How do you know it’s time for an upgrade? Here are five tell-tale signs…

1. You’re still imprinting credit cards using carbon paper.

First off, if you’re still doing this, please comment below with your business name and location. Watching someone process credit cards in this way would be like watching a cat walk on its hind legs – so completely bizarre, and yet somewhat intriguing. Sure, these imprinting machines are cheap (and sometimes free), but they’re completely dated. If a card is declined, you won’t find out until days after your customer is gone, and then it’s your inconvenience to track them down for a proper credit card. You know, because you have time for that. And on the chance that you lose these carbon paper slips, you’re not only out a lot of money (since you won’t be paid by those people), but your customers’ information could also be seriously at risk if it winds up in the wrong hands.

2. You hear the wretched dial-up sound – or worse, get a busy signal – when sending your customer’s credit card payment through.

If you use a credit card or POS machine that uses telephone connection to process the payment, it will require installing a separate landline to facilitate the outgoing call. This is a separate, unnecessary expense for your business. Just like VoIP telephone systems, POS systems can now be seamlessly and reliably integrated with the internet.

3. You have long lines at your cash register, and you think that’s a good thing.

The truth is, when you build up a long line at your cash register, it means your check-out processes are slow. No customer likes waiting in lines, and the more frequently they have to build in 10 minutes to check out, the less likely they’re going to return in the future. Today’s upgraded POS systems process payment quickly, while also updating your inventory, encrypting customer information, integrating with your accounting system, and making your employees’ jobs easier.

4. If you do business on the road, you mail invoices to collect payments. As in, snail mail.

Mobile payments is a booming industry these days. Options abound for small businesses that want to accept credit card payments while on the road. You can do so through hardware devices that connect to your cell phone, or you can use a POS mobile app through your smartphone or tablet to accept payment in a way that is quick, secure, and convenient.

5. You accept checks, but not credit cards.

We’re living in an increasingly plastic world. If you believe that cash is king, and that you are thumbing your nose at the payment processing companies by avoiding their fees, you might want to know that you’re likely also hurting your bottom line. Your unwillingness to accept credit cards may cause you to miss out on a significant customer segment that doesn’t carry cash on them. Intuit GoPayment estimates that businesses that do not accept credit cards lose up to $7,000 a year in sales. These days, interchange fees, especially in the case of some mobile payment providers, are lower than those you are charged through your average POS system, and much of the equipment you need to process credit cards can be offered for free when you open a merchant account.

source:http://www.resourcenation.com/blog/signs-you-need-to-upgrade-your-pos-system/34896/

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10 Signs Your IT Outsourcing Provider Wants to Dump You

CIO — It can happen to any relationship-one partner falls out of love with the other. While IT service providers and their customers have gotten better at seeking out outsourcing engagements likely to work for both parties over the long haul, sometimes they weren’t built to last.

Some of the biggest IT service providers have programs in place to extract themselves from relationships with the bottom 10 percent of profitability. "Providers today are much less likely to live with bad deals or money-losing accounts," says Stan Lepeak, KPMG’s director of research for advisory services

But breaking up is hard to do. The termination clauses of a contract may make it prohibitively expensive for unilateral provider pullout. So the vendor may back away from the account in more subtle ways, either to protect its margins or nudge the customer toward termination–or both.

"When deals become unprofitable–for any number of reasons–the vendor must try to raise the profitability," says Adam Strichman, founder of sourcing consultancy Sanda Partners. "When they start to take very aggressive actions toward profitability, this is the first–and best–signal that the deal is unprofitable. When their actions become too aggressive, that can also be interpreted as trying to get out."

"If the client’s only goal is to squeeze the rates as much as they can and they start playing up to get penalty awards for sub-par performance, they quickly become not only unprofitable, but also a risk for spreading a poor image of that provider’s performance into the market," says Phil Fersht, founder of outsourcing analyst firm HfS Research, who estimates that one in five outsourcing customers falls into that category. "Their providers quickly start to figure out how to either ‘lose’ them at renewal to a competitor or simply churn them via an arbitrator if this bet really bad. [But] there are many more examples where providers are having a terrible time trying to service clients which simply make them no money and they can’t get rid of them"

So how do you know if you’re one of the "problem" clients? Here are 10 telltale signs your IT outsourcing provider wants to dump you.

1. We Need to Talk. "The one thing that is relatively certain when a customer falls to the bottom 10 percent of a vendor’s portfolio is that the vendors will not be shy about letting them know," says Steve Martin, partner with outsourcing consultancy Pace Harmon. "In these problem scenarios, a provider’s first course of action is generally to voice their concerns to their customers and attempt to propose remedies through the standard governance process, rather than immediately developing subtle termination plots. They may also attempt to renegotiate the deal or work through critical issues in executive-level meetings."

source:http://www.cio.com/article/709743/10_Signs_Your_IT_

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10 problems with outsourcing IT

Takeaway: Outsourcing your IT functions may appear to make good sense, but beware of certain side effects that could negate the benefits.

The economy has hit everyone hard. Many companies have had to pare back departments, employees, budgets… on nearly every level. And many companies have done something no one thought they would ever do — jettison their IT departments in favor of outsourcing. On paper, it seems to make perfect sense. You have a company willing to handle your IT needs on an on-call basis. You’re not paying staff to sit around and wait for problems, nor are you having to pay benefits or deal with the issues that come with having computer engineers on hand. (I say that mostly in jest.)

But along with that approach comes a handful of issues you may not be prepared for. Let’s examine 10 of them.

1: Real cost
There are costs involved with outsourcing IT that many do not consider. For example, when you schedule an appointment with your outsourced IT company, you’re going to be charged for the drive time there and back. And what about when that outsourced engineer has no idea how to fix your issue and has to learn on the job? Are you willing to pay for that? It’s one thing if your own employees learn as they go. But it’s a different story when a contracted employee does it. There are other real costs as well, such as when you get recommendations from the outsourced company that aren’t actually needed. Upsales are common and sometimes unnecessary.

2: Time factor
When you have an emergency, it will have to wait until your outsourced IT department can get someone there. Drive time strikes again. You’re also subject to the calendar of your outsourced company, and many factors can cause your emergency to be pushed back. At this point, you are at the mercy of your outsourced IT department. Had IT still been in-house, the emergency would be dealt with right away.

3: Familiarity with network and systems
When your IT is in-house, your IT workers (more than likely) know your system and your network really well. They should: They probably built it. So it’s likely that in-house IT workers can keep your systems running more smoothly and solve emergencies much faster. Yes, it is true that even an outsourced IT department can learn your systems and networks. But there will be ramp-up time, as well as the possibility that a lack of documentation can cause serious issues.

4: Employee relationships
Although some may not see this as an issue, I have come across it many times. When employees are in-house, they know one another and know how to interact well with one another. If you are outsourcing your IT, you may or may not get the same engineer showing up every time. That means your employees must get used to different contractors and how they work. With an in-house IT staff, relationships can form and solidify. Of course, that’s not to say relationships with outside staff can’t be built. But bringing in IT from the outside causes a fluctuation. It may not always be a problem, but I have seen it create issues to the point that an engineer was banned from being deployed to a client.

5: Liability
There are certain instances where information or situations can become a liability when a third-party is brought in. Security measures may need to be implemented to protect company data, employees, systems… everything can become a liability. You never know when data is accidentally going to walk off on an external hard-drive or be left in a car and stolen. You add another piece to the puzzle, and more things can go wrong. Add to that the fact that no one is going to treat your company data with the care and importance that someone in-house will.

6: Loss of work
When an employee’s machine goes down, that employee will lose the ability to work until the outsourced IT department can make it in to resolve the issue. That loss of productivity can be costly. The response time and calendar issues you will face with outsourced IT will continually cause a loss of work. With in-house IT, response time is only a matter of walking down the hall. And one other major factor plays into this: priority.

7: Priority
This is a big one. Your company will most likely be on a long list of companies your outsourced IT company works with. Who gets priority? Honestly? The company that spends the most will get top priority. If that’s not you, that means you’ll get bumped down when that big spender tells the outsourced IT company how high to jump. If you want to remain on top of the priority list, you will either have to spend a lot of cash or keep your IT in-house.

8: Morale
The second you can members of your IT department, everyone else is going to be on the watch for their own pink slips. That kind of deflating of morale takes a long time to recover from. And when employees know they don’t have in-house IT, they know when problems arise, they may be slow to resolve.

9: Continuity
This takes into consideration many of the previous points. When your IT is outsourced, you’ll constantly need to redirect engineers, retrain people with regard to conduct and security, and deal with a fluctuating IT schedule you have no control over. And when a variety of engineers step in, issues will be resolved differently and setups can be completed without regard to in-house standards.

10: Control
You can’t control an external company. So now you have one more cog in a machine that is already incredibly complex. Why add more layers and pieces, which will only mean you lose more and more control over how your company behaves, performs, and grows? If you are one of those owners, shareholders, or managers who prefers to keep control over the daily workings of your company, it doesn’t make sense to outsource such a critical aspect of a smooth-running system.

The decision

The outsourcing issue will be argued back and forth until IT is no longer relevant. I have seen its effects from nearly every side and rarely does it work as well as those initiating the process would hope. Of course, it’s not a completely flawed system. But a lot of issues get overlooked when the idea of saving some salary comes to mind. Choose wisely where your IT dollars are spent. The returns could make or break your company.

source: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10things/10-problems-with-outsourcing-it/3016

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Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)

26 May, 2010
Written by Dexter Han
Beijing RayooTech Co., Ltd.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) refers to outsourcing of business functions generally performed by the white-collars and office employees to gain various benefits, for example, cost-saving, better-quality and ability of focusing on core competence. BPO includes outsourcing processes which are not that significant to a company. However, it is essential to smooth operations of the company. Customers transfer the whole responsibility of these functions to the provider who guaranteed quality standard of those certain services. Such processes include customer service, payroll processing, inventory management, etc.

According to the statistics collected by market intelligence firm IDC, the global market domain for BPO is estimated to be about 382.5 Bln USD in 2004. The research firm expects stable growth in the BPO industry with much more firms harvesting the profits of BPO around the world. The profits of BPO market domain is expected to reach 641.2 Bln USD by 2009, with a Cumulative Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 10.9 percent from 2005 to 2009.

BPO has made a large progress over years, to begin with time-sharing data processing in 1960s. Many Years later, BPO, like outsourcing, BPO has changed from being transactional to being strategic.

BPO Trends
The BPO industry is a developing section which was being studied by experts and researchers all over the world. Experts who tracked BPO for decades have observed a few trends in this area:

- The BPO market worldwide is expanding with new services getting added to the list of business processes that are outsourced and new locations coming up as potential offshore destinations, China being the most preferred destination for offshore BPO.

- Cost savings is one of the most significant drivers now. Information security, execution capability and financial stability are also important considerations when selecting a vendor.

- According to IDC, customer care and logistics are mature segments, while procurement and training are emerging markets and are expected to have a growth of more than 10 percent in the next five years.

- Gartner Group has also observed the latest trend of offshore outsourcing, in which companies establish their own offshore captive centers (OCC). These centers are equally shared service centers, and also allow the companies to retain control over the processes.

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To Outsource Software

20 May, 2010
Written by Jerry Tang
Beijing RayooTech Co., Ltd.

The term outsourcing is given a new name by the companies of IT sector. But the work they doing take a lot of risk worthy decision, so before undertaking it, any company must take serious discussion. We can’t miss the process of software outsourcing when talking about this.

We can tell lots of benefits of outsourcing software, but the most important factor is that software outsourcing will satisfy the company’s main aspect of core business. And the core aspect lies in the maximum savings of costs and investments and minimum utilization of monetary aspect. So we can conclude that outsourcing has provided a way for these companies to achieve all these aspects.

Quality is the most important thing for all companies. It decides the level of its trademark. Companies can outsource any other foreign firm for testing. In fact, it is better suited to test the software.

Any reason can influence the market price of products. So before launching products, the company always takes careful assessment of the market. However, it also has a great chance to fall. So, the only way to avoid losing is outsourcing software.

There are so many reasons why outsourcing software are so important. First, a proper wealth distribution is among the lower part of work labor. Second, if the project is done in an unjustified manner, it may lead to legal problems. Third, there are also great benefits for people’s daily life.

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