Der Bachelor Praxis Check ist eine aus meiner Sicht sehr sinnvolle Initiative. Vor dem Hintergrund der Bologna-Reform haben Uni-Rankings einen anderen Stellenwert bekommen, ist doch die Hochschul-Landschaft mit vielen neuen Schulen und Studiengängen erheblich unübersichtlicher geworden, sowohl für Personaler als auch angehende Studenten. Die Employer Branding Initiative Queb und CHE, das Zentrum für Hochschulentwicklung, haben soeben... Mehr...

Die Automatisierung ist noch lange nicht ausgereizt. Vor allem an den Schnittstellen zwischen innerbetrieblichen Materialflusssystemen mit ihrem mittlerweile hohen Automatisierungsgrad und dem Güterverkehr sehen wir noch Potenzial.

Der Generalschlüssel zu effizienteren Prozessen aber ist Information, oder genauer gesagt, integrierte Information. RFID- und GPS-gestützte Verfahren beispielsweise sind längst etabliert. Nun kommt es darauf an, Daten intelligent miteinander zu verknüpfen. Das „Internet der Dinge“ ist keine realitätsferne Vision, sondern wird die Entwicklung der Logistik in der nahen Zukunft prägen und verändern.

Der ökonomische und ökologische Druck verändert die logistische Landschaft. In diesem Zusammenhang bemerken wir als Intralogistikanbieter zwei scheinbar gegenläufige Entwicklungen. Auf der einen Seite die Konzentration auf wenige, größere Logistikzentren, die einfach wirtschaftlicher und effizienter zu betreiben sind als die vielfach historisch gewachsenen, dezentralen Strukturen. Dies wird durch eine steigende Nachfrage nach unseren individuell geplanten Hochregallagern belegt.

Parallel aber verzeichnen wir ein konstantes Wachstum im Segment der Systemlösungen, die Kardex Mlog speziell für kleinere und mittlere Warenaufkommen anbietet. Das ist nicht nur der generell zunehmenden Automatisierung geschuldet, sondern folgt möglicherweise auch einem anderen Megatrend – dem der Regionalisierung.

Beide Entwicklungen spiegeln unterschiedliche Seiten derselben Medaille: Es wird für Unternehmen immer wichtiger, durch Optimierung der Prozesse und Transportwege ihre Wettbewerbsfähigkeit zu erhalten. Auf der Seite der Intralogistik sind wir gefordert, Lösungen für beide Szenarien vorzuhalten.

    A quick reading through tech blog headlines over the past week alone yielded a dozen articles related to net privacy ranging from European ePrivacy Directive (CNet) to IE10 Do Not Track (WSJ) defaults.  If all the privacy attention is causing your eyes to glaze over (admittedly it can sometimes be pretty dry reading), here is a scenario that should peak your interest: if your company is indifferent you could actually be losing a lot of money. No, I’m not talking about potential lawsuits or anything; from my perspective, companies seem to be doing a good job posting privacy-aware policies and making it clear to their users how their data is used.  When I say losing money I’m talking about dollars lost by sacrificing ownership of your analytics data.  What you give up as payment for the cost of “free analytics” will likely surprise you. Let me lay out a scenario that hits home for most companies: Company XYZ has rolled out a new mobile App and the company is using Flurry Analytics in their app (or Google Analytics, or a host of other easy-entry analytics). The reasoning is that Flurry gives entry level insights into user experience and, well, it’s free. Like most companies that have published apps, the app conversion goal isn’t (just) the app purchase itself (most are free apps).  For most, their apps were created to sell in-app products, provide a service, or deliver an interaction with a brand to increase customer loyalty.  Whether it’s a service, a brand or an in-app purchase though, the investment in building the app is meant to drive strong in-app conversion rates. In the case of fictitious XYZ corp, let’s say they are an insurance company and they’d like to get users to research and expand their coverage for new insurance policies. Like everyone else, they need analytics because unless they understand how users are engaging with their app, they can’t improve it for a better user experience nor can they optimize it for higher conversion rates. But before XYZ Corp gives the power to their app developer to drop in analytics, they need to ask themselves why free analytics, Flurry, is giving away their analytics.  To answer that question, they need look no further than the Flurry terms of service and privacy policy  – Flurry’s monetization strategy is to use their data they collect (yes, it is THEIR  data, not yours) to target your users and sell their AppCircle advertising service. And what is the selling point of their advertising service?  The ubiquity of apps using Flurry gives them a wide knowledge of what other apps are installed on devices and they can offer a targeted ad service. Is that so bad?  Here is where XYZ starts losing money. A competitor company to XYZ makes the (reasonable) assumption that XYZ is using Flurry and they pay to advertise on Flurry’s AppCircle service.  There are plenty of apps on each users’ device that serve up targeted ads.  Following the competitive ad spend with AppCircle, now any user that has the XYZ app on their device gets ads targeted towards them for Insurance… only it is their competitors insurance. Flurry is not only collecting data about your app, they are combining it with all their knowledge of the other apps and behavior of your users and you gave them fully permission to do so, in fact, it’s _their_ data and that is how you paid for the “free” analytics.  Google Analytics is the same only add in a far wider array of interactions from email to friends circles. App Developer and blogger David Barnard summed up the hidden costs of free analytics in a frustrated post about Flurry weeks ago: “Turns out, I was paying in user data. Instead of offering me the opportunity to pay for the service, Flurry is now going to monetize the data I gave them by offering highly targeted ads.”  It’s this kind of cross-app/mobile site tracking that caused Apple to change their policy on using the UDID (a device ID that is persistent and accessible to all apps). Periodically Google Analytics and other free analytics like Flurry find themselves in the cross-hairs (or at least they are collateral damage from the explosion of some other privacy issue) and they shift themselves out of the spotlight, like they tried to do with the Apple UDID fallout (PCMag).  But they aren’t being forthcoming about what they replaced it with. Writer Ki Mae Heussner in an AdWeek article regarding the UDID replacement used by these companies (AdWeek): “It has also created an opportunity for those in the mobile world who use an alternate, sophisticated means of tracking called device recognition (or what some term “digital fingerprinting”) to make bold—and highly debatable—claims of being more pro-privacy, since these methods don’t rely on the controversial UDID. However, digital fingerprinting potentially involves the collection of potentially hundreds of other data points flowing off of a mobile device, which could set off just as many or more privacy alarms.” When you have a presence on many, if not most, mobile devices like Google Analytics, you can bet they have their own treasure trove of digital fingerprints stored and they are using this as the selling point of their service. The thing is, what most developers like Mr. Barnard at App Cubby aren’t aware is just how prevalent this is.  Even some paid analytics services publish data on “industry” trends, devices, competitive sheets, etc. and user profiling is a lucrative business. There hasn’t been any shortage of articles talking about Google’s changes in privacy policy a few weeks ago (TechCrunch), it caused an understandable stir. Unfortunately the focus on the articles seemed to center on the consolidation of Google’s privacy terms across it’s sites and services rather than the underlying questions I think we’re all asking. Certainly, consolidating your policies  to be more transparent to users should be seen as a good thing.  But I think what most of us were reacting to was our own realization of just how much we rely on a very wide range of services from Google and what that could mean to our privacy when one action in one service could feed a host of targeted advertising in every other service.  Google’s store of data has a lot of power. Users (and regulators) are keen to make sure that means in increase in responsibility. One area where Webtrends stands out: it’s YOUR data, it’s not combined with other customer data for industry trends or any other such statistics, and Webtrends doesn’t even share user IDs across apps or devices.  By not sharing your IDs we’re also making it clear that they are your users/visitors as well.  And because it’s your data, Webtrends created the industry’s best web services for accessing your data as well as enhancing it with other sources of data.  And our plugin model for our JavaScript encourages an open approach to creating leading edge analytics. Considering the value of your customer relationship (both real world money and user experience), ownership and data privacy may honestly warrant the cost of paid analytics all on its own.    

Da ist ja eine interessante Diskussion entstanden - Anonyme Bewerbungsverfahren vs Bewerbergespräche via Webcam - diskutieren sie mit in unserem Blog http://www.der-hr-blog.de/?p=863

Liebe Experten / Nutzer des CC Nachhaltige Geldanlage,

heute habe ich einen spannenden Vortrag von Oskar Edler von Schickh von VetaCom gehört. Inhalt: Projekt von VentaCom zu Wandlung von Kunststoff-Müll in Öl. Das klang sehr vielversprechend und überzeugend. Zur Einschätzung von Anbietern für Nachhaltige Geldanlagen setzen ich normalerweise auf das Forum Nachhaltige Geldanlagen (FNG), quasi Mitglied = relevant. Gibt es weitere Quellen, um Unternehmen zu bewerten, die nicht FNG-Mitglieder sind und ökologische / nachhaltige Gedlanlagen anbieten? Berichte der relevanten Fachmedien (Ecoreporter) sind natürlich auch hilfreich, aber vielleicht gibt es weitere Quellen.

Beste Grüße

Winfried Felser

Finnland hat ja mit der Baltic Sea Action Group eine Vorreiterrolle bei den Umweltfragen in der Ostseeregion übernommen. Die Reduzierung der umweltbelastenden Emissionen wird eine der wichtigen Themen der Zukunft sein. Somit müssen Technologien, die die Reinigung der Abgase an Bord ermöglichen, gefördert werden. Wärtsilä hat z.B. einen solchen „Schwefel-Scrubber“ entwickelt und bereits erfolgreich getestet. Auch die Anwendung und Verfügbarkeit von LNG wird verstärkt die Transportlogistik der kommenden Jahre beschäftigen.

    KPIs mean the world to those whose heads are immersed in the PPC world throughout the day. In-house? Agency? Non-profit? Doesn’t matter. If you’re playing in the search marketing field, you should have a goal to guide you. If you don’t have one, give me a ring and I’ll find one for you. For e-commerce clients, Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) ((revenue/spend)*100) is often used as a KPI. But it is not the end-all-be-all that many within the industry promote it as. ROAS is, in-itself, an island. A distant, lonesome island. Without knowledge of the “geographical” context (revenue, spend, and profit), ROAS is meaningless, and even worse, deceptive. I bring this to the table because ROAS is consistently used out of context. For example: “ROAS was 500% last month, and it’s 1,000% this month, so we are rocking it! Home run!” There’s no context surrounding ROAS in this statement. What did we spend? What happened to our revenue? ROAS alone is just a number that shouts, “Something changed!” Pretend you just launched your dream business, Flux Capacitor Inc. You’re selling high-quality flux capacitors. Your KPI is an ROAS of 1,000%. Your budget is $2 million a month. For each flux capacitor you sell, you receive $1,000 in revenue. To achieve an ROAS of 1,000%, you’d have to sell one flux capacitor for every $100 you spend. ($1,000/$100)*100 = 1,000%. Let’s say in March, we achieved an ROAS of 500%, well off of your 1,000% KPI. You make some changes to budgets, optimize your bidding and prepare for growth in April. At the end of April, you compile some numbers and see that ROAS came through at an astronomical 2,000%! ROAS quadrupled in a month. Your KPI is now being downright dominated! Your company is going to lift you above their heads and haul you through the hallways chanting your name. That’s ROAS as an island. So before we let them haul you around the office, let’s take a look at your ROAS in context. We’ll look at MoM (month-over-month) metrics to see how exactly we quadrupled the ROAS. Wait a second here. April’s spend. It’s $500!? Ouch, your credit card was declined at the beginning of April. Your ads were only active for a single day the entire month. Doh! Your ROAS is still 2,000%, but you only spent $500 of your $2,000,000 budget. See how quickly context took you from a marketing champion to something far less than champion-like. You just decimated Flux Capacitor Inc.’s potential profit by $7,490,000 for April. It’s an extreme example in many ways, but it proves a point. ROAS is an effective metric to measure the efficiency of your search program, but without context, ROAS is meaningless. If you have a mature search program and you’ve been using ROAS as a KPI, you may feel slightly at a loss. You shouldn’t. ROAS is a valid KPI in context, especially with a constrained, consistent budget. But, if you’re looking to take your account to the next level, you’ll want to begin exploring how to maximize your bottom line: profit. Profit maximization is the answer for aggressive advertisers who are looking to break free of ROAS constraints to grow their bottom line. And that is a whole other blog post! My next one actually…   For more information about how Webtrends can help you with PPC advertising, contact our team at chase.wells@webtrends.com or visit Webtrends.com.

Wegen der Anschrift und der Telefonnummer der Foveruka e.V. Köln, die die Betriebsrenten der Arbeitnehmer der Ford Werke, Visteon u.a. verwaltet, melden sich öfter Betriebsrentner in unserer Kanzlei. Wir haben zwar mit der Foveruka als Anwälte öfter zu tun, weil wir 1999 und 2002 Grundsatzurteile wegen der Ungleichbehandlung von Arbeitern und Angestellten in der Versorgungsordnung der Foveruka erfolgreich beim Bundesarbeitsgericht erstritten haben. Betriebsrentern steht nach § 16 BetrAVG auch alle drei Jahre eine Anpassung der Betriebsrente zu, was auch Rentner der Foveruka oft vergessen. Bei der Geltendmachung und Durchsetzung helfen wir gerne. Wir haben gerne auch mit Anschrift oder Telefonnummer weitergeholfen, zur Entlastung unseres Empfangs informieren wir Sie hier über die Adresse und die Telefonnummer der Foveruka in Köln: Foveruka e.V. Ford Versorgungs- und Unterstützungseinrichtung Emdener Str. 6 (Tor 6) 50735 Köln Telefon 0221 90-0 Telefax 0221 90-18623 Postanschrift: Foveruka e.V. 50725 Köln Michael W. Felser Rechtsanwalt Felser Rechtsanwälte und Fachanwälte Interview mit Rechtsanwalt Felser im WDR (MARKT)  Fernsehen wegen Anpassung der Betriebsrente Beiträge zur Foveruka: Beitrag im Rechtslexikon: Ungleichbehandlung und Anpassung der Betriebsrente bei der Foveruka Blogbeitrag: Foveruka-Betriebsrente – Noch bis 31.12.2010 Nachzahlungsansprüche aus 2007 Blogbeitrag: Foveruka: Nachzahlung der Betriebsrente für 2006 verjährt zum 31.12.2009 Blogbeitrag: Foveruka: Ford zahlt Arbeitern zuwenig