Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

The carousels are finally working at 100%. I hope they stay that way now. If we just had more hours in the day to get everything on them now, we'd be set. That being said, we've got some inventory management issues that needed addressed as well. For some unknown reason, our system was set to throw out the largest order, then make sure we had 50% more than the second largest order in stock. For items that we were averaging a few per year without the occasional large order we now have large quantities of. What a mess. Now that we're stocking more of the first few brands, though, we're getting more orders out the door in a faster manner. There are more and more orders in stock at the time they're placed. Now, if we could just get them all pulled, boxed, and out the door same day we'd be really cool. We started looking at some of our competitors this week. Competitors? That's funny. In any case, they're selling things at a competitive price. We're paying...

Man, is it ever hard to let anything go. But, alas, I have to give up some of my duties. We're going to try outsourcing SEO for ToolBarn.com to FathomSEO . The plan is to give them the tougher of our websites, have them try for some more competitive terms in a few of the categories we can make a few bucks in, and then consider allowing them to expand their efforts to everything. Seems to make sense, but it is still difficult to let anything out of my hands. After all, site development has been done primarily by me for so, so long. At least I still have Tool Parts Direct that I get to do SEO on. Speaking of Tool Parts Direct, I've put up an initial Froogle feed for the site. This has, of course, led to more visitors. To really make the most of this extra traffic, we also opened up Priority Mail, and since I integrated it with our inventory management system we could actually lower the rates we charge to our customers. We also were able to pass along the savings we're getti...

Why is it that vacations are always a time when you end up working a ton harder the week before and a ton harder the week after? How relaxing is that? Many of us in the IT industry, especially the web industry, end up doing some sort of work on our vacation. For me, it was uploading a new site for one of the companies owned by the place my paycheck comes from. Done mostly in flash, that'll rank really well in search engines. About as well as my house on a search for blue jeans. In any event, it was some amount of work, and wasn't exactly a vacation activity. While I was out, the techs came in and figured out what was wrong with our carousels. One will be needing a motor rebuild soon, 2 need it already, and 1 had a motor hooked up wrong and it blew up. I suppose that explains the problems with them. Thank you warranty. Well, I'm going to get back to doing nothing for the rest of the night, and I still have tomorrow and the weekend to enjoy some time away from work.

Ok, so the carousel that is showing so much promise started acting up without me knowing about it. Two of the four carousels decided to move as slow as they can and still be classified as moving. I guess that's how they go on strike. It's also really tough to get any real support without paying quite a bit for a tech to come out and work on it. Every time that the tech comes out, it seems like we end up paying for a lot of time for him to read the manual and very little time actually working on the carousel. If there were other options, I'm sure we'd be looking at them. However, we're sort of stuck since there aren't a lot of people who have ever even seen a carousel like this, let alone knowing how to fix one. I've been reading the manual on it, and the manual is about as useful as salt water to a fresh water fish. It starts with how the bolts and nuts work, then has a somewhat useful section on programming it to work with the hand controller, then goes on ...

We are just getting a corousel system implemented in our warehouse. After years of running around the building to fill our parts orders, it's become too cumbersome finding things. This means that we're now going to allow the parts to come to us. With a platform that raises and lowers, we'll have people waiting at the end of 70' long carousels for the parts to come to them, then light up a bin number and a quantity next to the shelf that is supposed to have parts pulled from it. That's all fine and dandy, but what's the best about this is that it becomes tougher for people to make pulling errors, so we'll not only be able to ship out more orders per day, but also have fewer errors and store more inventory. Considering that we've got well over 100% more sales than just 12 months ago, this will be important as we move forward. After getting top rankings for many of the most obvious key phrases for our site, there are still so many combinations available tha...