The antics of the big players in the market is bringing about the need to re-establish the National Office Products Association (NOPA), so that the industry has a voice to take to Government.
Selling copy paper at $1.99 per ream is akin to dumping, if not dumping in it's own right. Given Australia's poor competition legislation and a toothless ACCC (or toothless public servants that work there), the industry needs a voice to be heard. This sort of behaviour is not tolerated in other countries.
Besides the 3 big players, who only control collectively 22% of the market, the rest of the industry is in the hands of Australian small business people, who employ thousands of Australians and who make a significant contribution to Australia.
Posted by: Tony Peake in IT on
May 31, 2010
I thought it was time we touched on this topic. It is something that we all are familiar with and almost everyone can tell you the value of having a good password, but it is also the weakest point in the security chain. We use a password on our accounts to protect the information which we are storing, yet it is seldom, if ever, changed or updated and generally it is easily guessed by a determined person. We also find that we may have multiple different accounts where we need a password in our day to day working life (let alone the multitude of personal password requirements for our net banking, personal email, etc.).
Posted by: Anjana Rames in Retail Management, IT, B2B on
May 2, 2010
In our previous blog we talked about the strategic importance of service levels to differentiate your Office Supplies & Stationery Business from the rest. A good service comes in different forms and shape, one of which is fulfilling customers orders in a timely manner.
In order to fulfill orders we need the right stocks in our warehouse/store and managing this stock is key to customer satisfaction. We touched upon A & B stock analysis and how it helps achieve this. In this blog we will look at A,B,c stock management in more detail.
Posted by: Tony Peake in Retail Management, IT, B2B on
Apr 5, 2010
Before we start on this topic, there is one point I need to make. Take my following word as a guide only, and seek advice before acting, as this is a complex area. I make no claim to be an expert; I will act as a guide to provoke some thoughts.
Operating systems
Excluding Open Source software, this is an area where confusion over licensing can creep in as it is unnecessarily complex. Here are some basic points to help you with your understanding :-
Posted by: Tony Peake in IT on
Feb 28, 2010
If you can recall from my previous article, it is important to back up our data. Not just the data which we generally think about, but we need to search around and ensure we are getting copies of ALL valuable data in our business. We also discussed the need to backup as frequently as we can, and of some of the pitfalls which may occur.
This time, we'll press on and ask some more questions and examine some common best-practice strategies for small business.
How do we know we have a successful backup ?
Posted by: Andrew Penfold in Penfold Research on
Feb 22, 2010
I have just completed a series of discussions with industry operators about the state of the market, key trends - and what keeps them awake at night! One of my central observations is that although we all supposedly work in the one ‘office products' industry there is such a diversity of issues and fortunes according to the sector, niche or categories we operate in. One persons sleepless night can be anothers proud blush of success.
The strength of the independent dealer community has been a feature over the last year. Overall they have grown at higher than average rates, aided by their close customer contact and operational flexibility during the downturn.
While there are a large number of office product trends affecting different parts of the market, my top three in terms of overall long term impact are as follows. It is worth keeping these in mind as you plan and make decisions for your business in the coming years.
Posted by: Anjana Rames in B2B on
Jan 30, 2010
The products each reseller offer to their clients are more or less the same in the Stationery and Office Supplies Industry. So the key differentiator between any two resellers is the service levels they offer.
Service comes in different forms and shape. One of the most important aspects of a good service is the ability to fulfil customer orders in a timely fashion. This in turn is dependent on the availability of the right stocks in your warehouse or store.
Posted by: Tony Peake in IT on
Jan 30, 2010
This month I'd like to run through some thoughts on a most mundane topic - data backup. It's one of those things that really is a bit of a waste of time .......... until we need to recover a lost file which has great financial implications for us. What could be so important ? Perhaps the payroll files from last week, perhaps a proposal which we have been preparing for a month and it is to be delivered tomorrow, perhaps our outstanding orders file, perhaps our email file. When you think of it, we have quite a bit of valuable data lying around that would be difficult to quickly recreate accurately.
Lets run through and ask ourselves a few question !!
Posted by: Anjana Rames in B2B on
Dec 21, 2009
In our previous blogs, we looked at the importance of Identifying Dead Stock and went through a few strategies we could use to clear the Dead Stock identified.
Having the list ready for action is one mile stone completed, however execution is the key part of this exercise.
If this sheet is simply passed on to one of your staff members to take action, chances are this will be the last on their list of priorities.
Posted by: Tony Peake in IT on
Dec 21, 2009
This is the third and final discussion point on Business Continuity and discusses simple plans to ‘work around' IT system failures.
As a refresher - we set out to develop some basic plans in advance of any mishap to help us keep the business going in the event that we had a prolonged outage of our communications (phone / fax Internet) or of our IT systems.
Let's assume our IT Systems (in this case our IT server) has failed and we have determined that it may not be available for at least two day. The reasons for this may be a hardware component failure such as a main circuit board or our data has become corrupted or perhaps something else. In any case the rescue operation must be undertaken by IT experts and we need to focus on keeping the business running.
