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I visited my first Von Maur store in 1999, a decade after I relocated from southern boomtown Atlanta to Lincoln, Neb., a sleepy college town that only really wakes up on Husker football Saturdays. Today I am back home in Baton Rouge, La., still no bustling metropolis, but the food and football trump.

Urban Outfitters' store operations and visual teams are benefitting from a cutting-edge solution that provides upstream visibility with regard to store-delivery shipments and more robust tools with which to plan receiving the goods.

The application, StoreTrac from Philadelphia-based PCSTrac, is a Web-based inventory control and management application that delivers a store-level snapshot of shipments. It has been deployed across all the company's retail brands, a total of approximately 430 stores.

Managing labor remains one of a retail company's biggest challenges — and most untapped opportunities. JDA Software's Scott Welty talks about workforce management trends with Chain Store Age.

What are some common mistakes retailers make when it comes to managing labor?

According to Rick Chavie, VP of OmniCommerce at hybris Software in Atlanta, there are a few steps brands can take to make the most of Facebook Home.

"Give customers an incentive to activate push notifications through to Facebook," Chavie said. "You may not be able to get people to check your brand app regularly, but you indirectly feed it through Facebook Home."

Another way is to focus on time-of-day placement based on extrapolation of when customers tend to use your own app.

Social media giant Facebook is generating lots of buzz with the debut of its app launcher, Facebook Home, which turns existing Android smartphones into a Facebook-centric mobile device. (App launchers are applications that allow users to customize the home screen on their personal devices and add various other functionalities to it.)

Here are some recommendations from Alan Dabbiere, chairman of AirWatch, for in-store mobility management:

• For corporate-shared devices, retailers should take into consideration how to reconfigure devices when they transfer from one employee to another.

The use of mobile devices by sales assistants and other associates presents retailers with new opportunities — and new challenges. Of the latter, one of the most critical has do with managing and maintaining the devices. According to one expert, the help desk can't be expected to do it all.

"Every device needs to be configured and supported and managed in some way," said Alan Dabbiere, chairman of AirWatch, a provider of mobile security and enterprise mobile management, in a presentation at the National Retail Federation Conference & Expo.

After a successful pilot, Best Buy Canada is expanding its use of fully integrated, enterprise mobile point (mPOS) solutions on its selling floor. The new, tablet-based technology has improved customer service, including reducing checkout times, and staff productivity.

One hundred and forty one billion dollars. That's the estimated brand value of Walmart, according to Interbrand's "Best Global Brands" report. The annual study ranks the 50 most valuable U.S. retail brands, along with the top store brands in countries around the world.

Jim von Maur

President, Von Maur

HEADQUARTERS Davenport, Iowa

TYPE OF BUSINESS Department store retailer

NUMBER OF STORES 35 in 11 states (27 Von Maur stores, eight Dry Goods stores)

Seventeen years ago, in the January 1996 issue of Chain Store Age, Jack Arth, who at the time was president of Von Maur, explained how the circa 1928 department store retailer set out to differentiate itself from competitors such as the then hugely influential Federated and May chains.