Drop shipping differs from traditional wholesale trading in that it is a form of ‘just in time’ shipping. Basically, drop shipping means that the online seller will order the product from the wholesaler as and when customer orders are received. The seller simply receives the order and passes on delivery information to the wholesaler for delivery. The customer pays the seller, the seller pays the wholesaler and the seller earns the profit from the difference between the sale price and the cost price. So, the product does not pass through the hands of the seller at any time, and goes directly from the wholesaler to the customer in the drop shipping model.

The traditional wholesale trading method implies that the seller orders a stock of the product from the wholesaler and maintains this stock to service customer demand. The physical possession of the product is the differentiating element. This clearly has a cost associated with it. Firstly, there are storage costs, which can be daunting if the product occupies a large amount of space. Secondly, there will be shipping costs from the wholesaler to the seller. Additionally, there is the cost of carrying unsold stock for a long period of time that eats into profits from sold goods.

So suddenly, drop shipping seems like a great idea. But drop shipping has its drawbacks too. In most cases, especially if you are a small business, you will pay the full MSRP, which will squeeze your profit margins. Additionally, you may have little or no information on the status of your order from the wholesaler, affecting customer service levels. Since you are essentially passing on the cost of carrying inventory on to the wholesaler, you will be charged for it. But, on the upside, you will only need to pay when you receive customer orders.

Reliability is an issue when drop shipping – as a seller, you will be able to control and track your product’s delivery much better if you hold inventory. In case of drop shipping orders, the seller relies on the wholesaler’s delivery system, which may be surprisingly lax. Finding a reliable wholesaler is a critical task on its own.

If you are worried about the label on the box that is shipped to the customer, you may be pleasantly surprised to find that many wholesalers will include your packing slips and labels when they ship to your customers.

A couple of hybrids exist that are useful to know about: Buying from local wholesalers and hiring fulfillment houses. An alternative to carrying inventory and drop shipping is to buy from nearby wholesalers when you receive an order and ship it out immediately. Amazon started this way, but it works best for small start up businesses. The other option is to make a deal with a fulfillment house. This is an intermediary service that offers to maintain small amounts of inventory, assemble, order fresh stock, pick, pull, pack and ship out your product in accordance with your instructions and using your packing materials. A fulfillment house may provide a shopping cart online and customer call center, depending on the scale of operations. They will charge a fee based on various factors – amount of storage capacity etc, and may charge a small percentage of commission on sales. This model may work best if you are a seller of high margin items.

When you are working in a consultancy office like me in Malaysia, it is quite common that you will be an all round worker. i.e. you have to handle a lot of project from design level until construction level. It also includes the management level works. Below are some tips for working more efficiency:

1. Every day, all corresponding letters or faxes must be attended immediately. Avoid any delay on these. Else you will receive a number of complaints from client. Unless the request needs a lot of attention, then you have to arrange a time to attend it.

2. Any return calls must proper manage. Select a best time for you to return call.

3. It is recommended that to do any brain thinking works in early morning; because it is the best time for thinking. Try not to do any brain thinking works after any site visits; especially in the hot afternoon. It also not recommended that when your emotion is bad such as angry.

4. If you feel tired than push the entire difficult tasks to another time, else what you do now will have a lot of mistakes. When human is tired, performance is low.

5. During meeting, try to answer any questions arise and resolve in meeting. But if you are not sure about something, remember not to commit it.

6. Try not to do long overtime work such as every day work until 1am or 12am morning. Next day start working in 7am. Overtime works for short period only. If you continue for a few weeks, you will find that you will be tired in day works. As a result, your performance will drop. This is not to ask you to lazy.

7. After a long working period, a tea break is a good time for you to relax. You will be more effective when you return to work.

8. When you assign any duty for your workers, bear in mind that you have to follow up with them through out the process. Do not last minute, call up them and ask for results! If your workers not doing your works, then how?

9. Project files management is important. Every completed project must be proper filed. No doubt that you may feel that this is waste of time but it will be helpful when you are looking for this project file after say 3months. If you put else where, you will be required a search for project file. Sometime, it consumes half a day or more. In a way, you are wasting your valuable time.

10. Project files management also important in computer filing system. Do not simply save you file any where in hard disk. Put into a proper folder and with good naming to folder. If some file had a lot of amendment, one of the ways is to save in date format. After some time, you can trace it more effectively. Remember to backup your files more frequently, you will not know when your hard disk is going to damage, your computer attacked by virus and etc.

11. Try to manage necessary thing to be brought to site! Do not left any things in office when you go for site visits. Otherwise you have to pay another journey to there. You will not feel it when is near by. How about to trip that need a day journey?

Definition of the 80/20 Principle

The 80/20 Principle is based on the fact that in most cases 80% of the results come about due to 20% of the effort. The same is true in reverse 80% of failure is due to 20% lack of effort or effort in the wrong direction. The relationship between effort and results are unbalanced. When actually measured it may turn out that only 15% of the effort resulted in 80% of the result or 25% of the effort resulted in 73% of the result, but it will hardly ever be 50% of the effort resulting in 50% of the result. In other words it will never be balanced.

If you are looking at products, you will find the about 20% of any given number of products in a company account for about 80% of the profits. The flip side of this would be that 80% of the products make only 20% of the profits. Nearly always, a small proportion of the total products produce a large proportion of the profits.

How to use the 80/20 Principle

There are two applications of the 80/20 Principle, 80/20 Analysis and 80/20 Thinking.

80/20 Analysis

Precise

Quantitative

Requires investigation

Provides facts

Highly valuable

80/20 Thinking

Fuzzy

Qualitative

Requires thought

Provides insight

Highly valuable

80/20 Analysis looks at the relationship between two sets of data. One set is always people or objects, usually a large number of 100 or more, that can be turned into a percentage. The second set of data relates to some interesting characteristic of the people or objects that can be measured and turned into a percentage.

80/20 Thinking is a hypothesis about a possible imbalance between inputs and outputs. Instead of collecting data and analyzing them, we estimate them. 80/20 Thinking requires us to spot the few really important things that are happening and ignore the large number of unimportant things. When we are using the 80/20 Principle, we do not assume that its results are good or bad or that the powerful forces we observe are good. We decide if they are good and if so encourage the minority forces in the right direction.

The 80/20 Principle turns conventional wisdom upside down

Application of the 80/20 Principle implies that we should do the following:

1. Celebrate exceptional productivity, rather than raise the average efforts.

2. Look for the short cut, rather than run the full course.

3. Exercise control over our lives with the least possible effort.

4. Be selective, not exhaustive.

5. Strive for excellence in a few things, rather than good performance in many.

6. Delegate or out source as much as possible in our daily lives to specialists, instead of doing the work ourselves.

7. Choose our careers and employers with extraordinary care, and if possible employ others rather than being employed ourselves.

8. Only do the thing we are best at doing and enjoy most.

9. Look beneath the normal texture of life to uncover ironies and oddities.

10. In every important sphere, work out where 20 percent of effort can lead to 80 percent of returns.

11. Calm down, work less and target a limited number of very valuable goals where the 80/20 Principle will work for you, rather than pursuing every available opportunity. 1 2. Make the best of the few times in our life when we are at our creative peak and things are working really well.

No boundaries

No activity is immune from the influence of the 80/20 Principle. If you want the benefit from 80/20 Thinking, you have to do it!

When I was attending tech school and had taken all the courses offered in electronics, I unknowingly used the 80/20 Principle by applying for a teaching job at the same school. That small step was the tipping point in my career and eventually landed me a job with Eastman Kodak Co.

When Jesus called Simon Peter to follow him and become fishers of men, he was using the 80/20 Principle by choosing a few to touch millions. Jesus concentrated on the twelve, teaching them so that the world might be reached.

Suggested reading: The 80/20 Principle, By Richard Koch, ISBN 0-385-49174-3

Think of an example in you life where the 80/20 Principle worked for you.

Problems Within companies, coordination of information, whether technological or professional (related to architecture, engineering, or other kinds of practices) is of utmost importance. Project coordination always calls for sharing of schemes, plans, and timetables. Sometimes, the coordination of meetings takes up more time than the actual meetings. Undoubtedly, the satisfaction of the clientele and the relationship with them are of capital importance. That said, building that relationship requires time.

Solution

Virtual meetings conducted through web conferencing have all the functionalities needed to share documents on the screen as well as to transmit them. The same applies to a Powerpoint presentation, a project diagram done with Microsoft Project, or an image. By opening an interactive white board, the participants can work together on a scheme, with a virtual pen. Moreover, the availability of the colleagues can be known from the indication given by the IP software, Skype. This way, meetings can be held on demand and in time, thus eliminating the need for having to wait for the right time for everybody to get together for that purpose.

Results

A better coordination of the resources required for the development of products or the realization of projects reflects directly on their quality as well as on the time needed for their completion. The better coordination of the working teams is generally translated into a lower rejection rate. In all chapters, the potential economies are evident. The time saved can be devoted to optimizing the relationship with the client, as this is an imperative condition to deserve the client’s loyalty and to renew the experience.

About Tele-efficiency Tele-efficiency helps its clients to save time, improve their synergy and lower their travel expenses. Offers WEBconference services at a fixed rate, under the trademark Conferenceware, integrated with CRM applications and with Skype. The greeting is customizable for each client's company image with their logo. Also offers a free 30-day trial period followed by a quarterly or yearly service contract for 25.£, 40.€, 45.$US, 50.$CAN/month or less.

Are you ready for a new season in your business? It’s that time of year when a confluence of events occur. We have the fever of March Madness combined with the eternal hope of Spring Training. I know, where you live, it might not seem like Spring just yet.

We grew up in New England, where Spring is very fickle. Sometimes it’s early, often it is, well,….not-so-early. I have observed that those who have the greatest success don’t let the seasons determine their future. They set their goals and make plans to reach them. As the song goes “Don’t’ stop thinkin’ about tomorrow.” I’m all for that. We need dreams. We thrive on seeking, on pursuing.

Yet, in order to move toward those dreams, we can’t wait for Spring… We can’t wait for tomorrow. We need to come to play today. Do something now to assure that your Spring will be full of blossoms…fruitful, colorful…and the cornerstone to a prosperous, bountiful, success-filled season of growth. “For everything there is a season.”

Decide that NOW is the season for you to make it happen. Energize your life…energize your business by making THE decision. That, “yes, I’m ready… Ready for the Championship run for me and my team. This will be the best Spring we’ve ever had.”

This is the time to step up to the plate. To get in the game. Make March count. Create March Madness in your business. Use this Spring Training to prepare for a GREAT Season...a Championship Season where YOU WIN… in your business and in your life.

In today's working society, which links to our office servers so that we can continue to access data without being physically around in the office. Some are even issued with a phone so that we can be reached at all times.

Even on vacation, we are told to be contactable 24/7. Though our bosses may not call us, the thought of having someone call you while you are on holiday really puts off the enjoyment of having your time off.

At work, meetings frequently stretch till 5 to 6pm, sometimes even till midnight. I have heard horror stories of how executives miss their meals because of a meeting that went overtime. It is not only bad for the gastronomical aspect of health, but also taxing on the mind and spirit.

Work is meant to occupy one's time and to allow one to earn income to support his or her activities. Of course, there are other intangible aspects of work, such as the passion for a particular field, the need to socialise and to feel gratification with some success at work.

It should be realised that workers are not machines. Only with proper relaxation and rest can an engine run at optimum capacity. I truly believe that workers should be rewarded for their efficiency and hard work by being allowed to go home on time, take time off flexibly and not being disturbed while on holiday.

Work is meant to enhance one's life and not meant to prevent anyone from enjoying his or her personal life. It saddens me when I hear of anyone being deprived of a personal life because of work. Employees should channel their energies to increase their productivity at work so that they can have more time for their own personal lives after office hours.

The author is an avid critic of people with an imbalanced work-life composition as it had robbed him of something precious to him. He strongly believes in family values and quality personal and social time, but he too believes in work efficiency, quick thinking and ruthlessness at work.

While it is true that staying late at work has developed into a culture in today's working society, most people tend to work longer hours for another important reason: job security. Regardless of race, age and gender, I believe this applies for workers around the world.

Many think, especially in the last few years, that if they do not work late, their bosses might think them as lazy and replace them. This mindset needs to be changed.

In my previous appointment, my boss expected me to work long hours on weekdays and even during weekends, despite having finished my work on time. My efficiency was exploited as a result.

My new appointment allows me much-needed flexibility. I am allowed to take time off anytime I want as long as my work is done and urgent projects are settled beforehand. I am also not required to work during weekends, unless I volunteer to do so.

My quality of life has improved as I am now able to spend more time with my family and developing other interests, like photography, internet, etc.

People who stay long past office hours should not necessarily be construed as hardworking and driven because they may not be that productive after all. Shouldn't companies evaluate employees' performances based on their creative thinking and efficiency rather than their willingness to slog long hours?

Companies should be educated properly to eradicate this worthless culture that we are following. It should be realised that working smart is working right. To end off, I feel that only by having a work-life balance can the staff produce more during normal working hours.

The author is an avid critic of people with an imbalanced work-life composition as it had robbed him of something precious to him. He strongly believes in family values and quality personal and social time, but he too believes in work efficiency, quick thinking and ruthlessness at work.

I get a lot of emails asking how I find the time to write an article every day.

2 reasons:

1) I type fast
and
2) I make my day as productive as possible.

Here's how to make your day more productive.

Step 1 - Get up earlier.
And yes, that requires going to sleep earlier. But I'm not talking an hour or two...but only 10 or 20 minutes earlier per day.

The extra 20 minutes are magic time...the time in morning when I, as many people do, get more done than they do in several hour blocks at other points later in the day. So get up sleepyhead, and use the solitude to take care of business.

(And when you get into work, do the same. Get in early, get straight to work, and you'll find yourself ahead of the crowd in no time.)

Step 2 - Water x 2
Water plays an important role in getting my morning off to a fast start. First, I drink 2 cups of cold water to wash down 3 fish oil capsules. Then I start on breakfast (oatmeal, protein, berries, yogurt, and nuts) while sitting down to answer the emails you've sent me overnight.

Getting up 10 minutes earlier to answer these emails has made a huge difference in my productivity. No question. Consider doing the same for yourself.

The second role of water is the shower. People are more creative around running water. And I'm not the first to say this...Matt Furey has brought this up as well, saying that he gets a lot of his ideas when surrounded by water...there must be something about being in water that stimulates the mind.

So powerful are the effects of water on my creativity that I literally have to write the ideas down as soon as I get out of the shower. Once that water stops running, the ideas start to vanish...

Now the only thing that compares in terms of idea stimulation, for me, is exercise. So when you workout, take a note pad - not only to record your workout but to brainstorm and problem solve.

Step 3 - Nutrition
I've started the day with the healthiest supplement possible - fish oil, and I eat protein, fiber, berries, and nuts to start my day - giving me the fiber to control my appetite and blood sugar till the next meal.

Step 4 - Green Tea
Do not pass go. Do not stop at Starbucks. Do not collect your regular caffeine-loaded beverage. Instead, brew your own organic Green Tea to provide you with a lower dose of caffeine (or none at all if you get naturally de-caffeinated Green Tea). Army researchers have found that smaller amounts of caffeine delivered at more frequent intervals lead to better performance. Don't overdose on caffeine every morning.

And if you get a headache without your morning cup of coffee, congratulations! You're addicted to the world's most common drug. And you might want to do something about that...

Step 5 - A Steady Supply of Protein, Healthy Fats, and Fiber Self-explanatory by now, I should hope! Snack on almonds, lean protein sources, fibrous vegetables, an apple, etc. over the morning to keep mentally sharp.

Step 6 - Bodyweight Energizer Bunny

Remember the secret to instant energy when you hit the a mid-morning motivational slump...

10 reps of the Y-Squat - This is a bodyweight squat with your hands held up in a "Y" position.

Step 7 - Don't let lunch rob you of your mental energy Unless you want to go straight from lunch into an hour-long productivity-destroying nap, then lay off the breaded veal sandwiches at lunch.

Stick to the program: lean protein, fibrous green vegetables, Green Tea, healthy fats, etc. Avoid these mental buzz killers: soda, pizza, a lot of bread, french fries, desserts, and so on.

If you want to run an elite mental engine, you have to burn high-performance fuel.

Step 8 - Lose Fat & You Will Make More Money Now that's an unconventional way to increase productivity.

But welcome to the harsh reality of size-ism.

Research shows that overweight men and women make less money than their normal weight colleagues. While the world is not fair, you can even the playing field by eating and exercising properly.

The healthy lifestyle and workouts will help lose fat, while increasing your creativity and productivity. I smell promotion.

So let's leave it there for today...because if you aren't having a massively productive morning by now, then I'm not convinced you even get up before noon.

I talk a lot about the importance of having solid processes in your business operation. Establishing processes that have been tested, refined, and continually examined for improvement is probably, in my humble opinion, the most important thing a business owner can do to insure success in the business enterprise. When you have good working processes in place, your business runs more smoothly and the stress levels associated with the "daily grind" are minimized.

I was working with one of my clients the other day and we began discussing a process that he had put in place to display his product in the show rooms of some of his buyers, on consignment. His plan was simple and seemed like a good one. He would allow the buyer to show off his product in their showroom without invoicing the buyer until after the product was sold to the end customer. There is nothing really unusual about this process except that my client's product was the only one that the buyer was keeping on consignment. Because this was not a normal practice for the buyer, the buyer had no process in place to notify my client when the item was purchased by the end consumer. So I asked my client how he would monitor that.

My client is a small startup company and is currently doing lots of marketing by hitting the streets and knocking on doors. So he said to me, "While I am out cold calling on new prospects, I can just drop by and see if the item is still in the show room. If it isn't, then I'll invoice them and send them another." He added, "This will also be a good way for me to stay in touch with my new buyers."

This sounds like a good idea until you begin to scale this process into a larger version. There are two important concepts one must keep in mind if you are developing a good process. The first is that it must be simple and easy to follow. The second is that it must be scalable. By scalable, I mean it must work when you are small and also work if your business explodes and becomes extremely huge. In this example just given, my client's process would work fine while he is small, but if his business suddenly expanded and instead of two or three businesses displaying his product on consignment, there were hundreds, the process would fall apart because there is not enough time in the day for him to visit all of these businesses. Eventually he would lose track of where his products were and whether or not they had been sold.

Sometimes we will develop a process that appears to be a good one, and over time we discover that it does not work as our business changes. That is ok if you are continually examining the process and improving it as you grow. The important thing is to have the process, make sure it is scalable, and continue to improve it.

To Your Success -

Do you like the new color printers’ speed and capabilities? Printer manufacturers make it very easy for organizations to utilize fast printing with excellent color by reducing the purchase price but clobber them with the cost of toner cartridges and other consumables to run the devices.

On the other hand, older printers are just as costly in the long run - they are inefficient, have very few capabilities and the average price of a black toner cartridge is $60 with a 3,000 page yield. In addition, because there is no other way to dispose of it, excess toner is usually thrown away instead of recycled, adding to carcinogenic waste in our landfills.

When you buy newer printers you get better toner cartridges that totally recycle excess toner as well as a recycling policy from the manufacturer. For example, HP sells you an ink cartridge with a prepaid return envelope making re-cycling convenient for you.

Whether you are a small- to medium-sized business or a large organization, you can consolidate a number of desktop printers with limited capabilities and high consumable costs into a multifunction printer (MFP) that prints, copies, scans and can send a fax – all in one machine. For your marketing needs, your MFP may also do high-resolution color printing.

Well, all that new technology is great but at what cost? The printer manufacturers will make it easy for you to acquire the devices and from a pure maintenance angle, consolidating 10 to 20 desktop printers into one MFP makes sense.

The new printers have more efficient toner cartridges with 5,000 to 10,000 page yields per black cartridge and 3,000 to 5,000 per color cartridge. Depending on the amount of color on a page, the page yield per cartridge can be significantly less, especially when printing presentations with a lot of solid color areas on the pages – this may result in as little as a 500 page yield for a color cartridge.

A person understanding the need for self discipline and a sincere understanding of the impact on the environment will not print anything they do not really need, select draft mode for all prints until the final version, and use only color when necessary, such as in marketing materials for use.

However, most of us do not belong to that group of people and need some help. This help can come in form of Document Output Management, where the management system enforces policies that reduce paper and toner waste.

For example, a 12-page presentation when printed in high-resolution full-color mode can cost as much as $5 whereas the same presentation in draft black and white mode would cost 36 cents and if printed in duplex 18 cents. If your users do not know this or just don’t care, you can be spending thousands of dollars per printer unnecessarily.

A Document Output Management System allows you to apply rules to certain users, printers and document types, so that shop floor workers can only print black, a manager can only print reports in color, the legal department can only print final contracts in high-resolution and other documents in black and white draft mode.

On top of the waste generated due to the lack of appreciation and the time it will take to educate staff in sustainability, there is the element of abuse of office equipment by printing, copying and faxing personal documents on equipment in the office.

Do not be fooled by fixed-cost per page contracts, as you will find they are calculated on a minimum annual use as well as an average color per page. What this means is, that if you use fewer pages, the service provider will deliver the paper to you anyway whether you need it or not. Also, if you use more color toner cartridges than stipulated in your contract based on the average use they will be charged to you. The experience of almost all color MFP users is that they used more color cartridges than they projected for all the reasons mentioned.

Printer manufacturers do not want to sell you document output management systems and will only offer you proprietary solutions, to get you totally dependent on their equipment and consumables. There are independent software vendors that provide state-of-the-art output management solutions that will work with all industry standard printing systems and MFPs, some of which can even run part of the solution within the printer or MFP, not requiring any additional hardware, just the software running on a server PC.

If you looked at this year’s energy bill and compared it to last year’s, you will have noticed it has gone up. If you looked at your old black and white toner cost and compared it with your black and color toner cost of you new MFP devices, it has probably more than doubled.

Don’t get me wrong, to stay competitive, reduce support needs, improve presentations where needed and benefit from improved duty cycles, you have to invest in new technology devices. However, you also want to have an overall reduced cost despite the extra capabilities. It is in your interest to control cost and improve productivity, while protecting you corporate secrets and the privacy of your employees and customers. Therefore, your responsibility is to deploy a state-of-the-art document output management system.

A rules-based document output management system will pay for itself faster than most other software packages that promise savings. The benefits in an MFP printing environment with predominantly color printers, where 90% of the print jobs do not require color, are huge and an amortization can be as short as a few months. But also in a predominantly black toner environment the toner savings can be as large as 30% as most documents can be produced in lower toner density.

Additional savings can be achieved with an ID-based print collection, also referred to as pull printing, where a print job remains in the print server queue until the owner of the document is identified and authenticated at the printer of choice. Rules that documents that have been in the queue for more than three days will be automatically deleted as well as allowing the user to look at the print queue and manually delete uncollected prints usually lead to a further savings of 10-15% of the cost of consumables.

If an organization is serious about sustainability and their environmental policies they will include document output management as an essential tool towards achieving sustainability. Output Management can make measurable improvements to workflow, toner use, paper waste for printing and copying as well as document tracking and accounting to comply with new governance and accountability requirements as well as reducing an organization’s carbon footprint.

Klaus Bollmann is a veteran in printer output management and has been in the forefront of innovative output management technology for more than 20 years. He was the original developer of many of the concepts used in today’s multi function printers including the FollowMe printing concept.

Some printer makes allow output management by independent vendors to run embedded on their printers. In 2006, HP was one of the leading printer makers in this field. HP is different in as far that independent software can run on the printer as well as their ability of accepting independent manufacturer’s authentication readers can be plugged directly into the HP printers’ USB host ports, requiring no external authentication devices and making this a more cost effective solution rather than using external authentication hardware.