Thursday, June 25, 2009

Marketing System

The Commerce Server 2007 Marketing System is a high-performance, versatile platform that you use to perform targeted personalized e-marketing through the Web or electronic mail. It assists e-commerce enterprises in effectively communicating relevant messages to shoppers in order to improve sales either directly or indirectly.

The Marketing System includes support for the following functions:

Content targeting, up-sell and cross-sell capabilities, advertisements and testing, e-mail campaigns, discounts, and coupons.

Combining and prioritizing campaign items. Campaign methods include the following:

Discounts. Create and edit discounts, combine discounts, set discount interactions, apply order-level discounts, shipping and leveraged discounts. An example of a discount is buy one product, get a second product at a 20% discount.

Awareness advertisement. Create and edit ads. For example, showcase a newly introduced product on the homepage of the Web site.

Suggestive selling. Create expressions that you can use to target ads or discounts. For example, if a shopping cart contains Product A, show banner ad B.

Direct mail. Create and send direct mail to lists of users. For example, send a newsletter or promotional mail piece to all active customers each month.

Managing campaigns for customers who compete in the same industry so that the competitor's ads never appear on the same page.

Enabling customers on the Web site to see ads and apply discounts by using coupons or entering promotion codes.

Enabling business managers to create and manage campaign items such as discounts, ads, and direct mail that they use as marketing tools to increase sales.

Publishing campaigns into production so that campaigns only become visible to the run-time system on activation and approval.

Generating reports to measure key metrics.

Marketing System Integration and Feature Areas
The Marketing System integrates with the Catalog, Orders, and Profiles Systems, and the Data Warehouse. It includes these five main feature areas:

Campaigns. Manages the campaigns, customers, advertisements, and discounts which form marketing programs. The Campaigns module is integrated with both the Profiles System and the Catalog System through expressions. Expressions enable you to target advertisements to users and to apply discounts to products.

Content Selection Framework (CSF). A platform-level framework for building targeted content delivery applications on the Internet and making customization and extension of the advertising and discount delivery systems easier. The CSF allows for multiple pieces of content to be retrieved as a record set with only one call, which creates a significant timesaving.

Expression Evaluator Engine (EEE). Provides the logic to evaluate expression objects. An expression is a condition that Commerce Server evaluates against profiles to determine whether to deliver content, or perform another action. For example, an expression might be user total visit > 100. If this expression evaluates to True, a specific piece of content displays to a user who has visited your site more than 100 times.

Mailing List Management. Manages lists of users created for a direct mail campaign. You can create, import, and export multiple lists focusing on different user profiles. You can maintain opt-out lists and references as part of a direct mail campaign. The mailing list management database maintains direct mail lists, per job opt-out lists and global opt-out lists.

Direct Mailer Service. A fast, scalable service that you use to send personalized e-mail messages from a Web page, or non-personalized mailings from a flat text file, to large groups of recipients. Direct Mailer tracks e-mail and records which messages are sent and which are clicked (opened). This enables you to analyze the success of a direct mail campaign. The Direct Mailer service is designed to send bulk personalized e-mail messages to millions of users.

Working Capital

the funds that are readily available to operate a business.
Example: Working capital comprises the total net current assets of a business minus its liabilities.Current assets â€" current liabilitiesCurrent assets are cash and assets that can be converted to cash within one year or a normal operating cycle; current liabilities are monies owed that are due within one year.

If a company's current assets total $300,000 and its current liabilities total $160,000, its working capital is:$300,000 â€" $160,000 = $140,000

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Challenges and Strategies of Matrix Organizations:

Top-Level and Mid-Level Managers’ Perspectives

Thomas Sy, College of Business Administration, California State University, Long Beach Laura Sue D’Annunzio, A.T. Kearney Inc

sing surveys, inter-views, and work-shops with 294 top-level and mid-level managers from seven major multinational corporations in
six industries, we identified the top five contemporary challenges of the matrix organizational form:
(1) misalignedgoals,
(2) unclear roles andresponsibilities,
(3) ambiguousauthority,
(4) lack of a matrixguardian, and
(5) silo-focused employees.

We also provide managers with the best practices that will improve their matrix organizations.

Interest in matrix organizational structures peaked during the 1970s and 1980s.Since that time, research and literature on the
matrix have dropped noticeably.Simultaneously, organizations continue to adopt the matrix as a viable alternative to
deal with their increasingly complex

Overview of the Matrix

By its simplest definition, the matrix is a grid-like organizational
Matrix Forms structure that allows a company to address multiple business dimensions using multiple command structures. The matrix organizational form emerged in the aerospace industry during the 1960s as government contracts required a project-based system linked directly to top management (Knight, 1977). While the matrix can take many forms, three common variants are the functional matrix, balanced Functional Balanced Project matrix, and project matrix (see Exhibit 1) (Burns, 1989; Galbraith,Matrix 1971, 1973; Kolodny, 1979; Larson & Gobeli, 1987). Matrix organizational structures are comprised of multiple business dimensions.
Basic matrix structures have two dimensions (e.g., function by prod-
Employees remain Classic model by Employees moves full members
which the matrix between function matrix, geography by product matrix). More complex matrix of functional form is known.
al departments
structures could encompass three or more dimensions. For example,
departments and projects and a company could be structured not only to focus on product and Employees are respectively retain Processes and officially function, but also to deal with geographic differences.