Business Analytics

Hormel Foods Corporation recently awarded 90 suppliers with a 2013 Spirit of Excellence Award for their roles in the company’s continuous improvement process throughout the last year. These suppliers are from a variety of areas, including contractors, pork procurement, provisions, ingredients, packaging and transportation.

Hickory, N.C. --Third-party logistics (3PL) provider Transportation Insight is introducing a line of end-to-end e-commerce solutions. As a full-service 3PL providing domestic transportation, international logistics and warehousing services, Transportation Insight collaborates with e-commerce clients' existing transportation departments.  

The strategic partnership uses the best of the shipper's historic practices and advanced third-party logistics processes to achieve cost reductions, improve supply chain visibility and enhance customer service.

New York -- The month of March saw a steep rise in smartphone-generated traffic, orders, and revenue by consumers to retailer smartphone-optimized websites over the year-ago period, according to mobile commerce platform Branding Brand. In March 2014, smartphones generated 29.4% of total online visits, up 42.7% from March 2013 (62.9% iOS, 36.4% Android). The market share of non-mobile (desktop) visits decreased 21.1% from March 2013 to March 2014.

Deerfield, Ill. - Walgreens had March 2014 sales of $6.43 billion, an increase of 4.5% from $6.16 billion for the same month in fiscal 2013.

Same-store sales increased by 3.5% in March. Calendar day shifts positively impacted total same-store sales by 0.6%.

Camp Hill, Pa. -- For the four weeks ended March 29, 2014, same-store sales at Rite Aid increased 0.7% from the prior-year period. March front-end same-store sales decreased 5%, with 4.1% of the decrease attributable to a shift in the timing of Easter, which falls on April 20 in 2014 compared to March 31 in the prior year.

Total drugstore sales for the four-week period increased 0.4% to $1.95 billion, compared to $1.94 billion for the same period last year.

Sam’s Club and the Gallup organization have launched a new quarterly tracking poll that focuses on the smallest of small business.

The poll is designed to look at what Sam’s is calling “microbusiness,” companies with five or fewer employees, that represent a core customer of Sam’s Club and are estimated to total 25 million.

Sunnyvale, Calif. – Application support and maintenance (ASM) may hold potential to deliver $6.8 billion in savings to Fortune 2000 organizations. According to a survey of 300 U.S. and U.K. CIOs released by IT services provider HCL Technologies Ltd., ASM now accounts for 38% of large organizations’ overall IT budget each year.

Talk of nearshoring and a resurgent U.S. manufacturing sector weren’t enough to help the Stanley Furniture Company avoid shuttering a domestic manufacturing plant that employs 400 people.

Following steep losses last year, Stanley said it would close its 562,000-sq.-ft. facility in Robbinsville, NC., where ironically enough the company’s Young America line of Juvenile furniture was manufactured.

After a strong start to the holiday season, harsh weather took a toll on Jos. A. Bank which reported solid profit growth and a 1.8% same store sales increase during what is likely to be one of the company’s final earnings reports as a public company.

At the recent Oracle Industry Connect Conference held in Boston, a number of speakers from prominent retailers including Kohl’s, Hot Topic, and C. Wonder extolled the virtues of “vanilla” implementations of enterprise systems. In this context, vanilla means implementing an enterprise platform with all or many of that vendor’s applications, minimizing customization or use of one-off “best of breed” solutions.