HUMAN RESOURCE ASSIGNMENT

Human Resource Assignment

Human Resource Assignment

Introduction

The Container Store, the nation's leading retailer of storage and organization products, utilizes the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform™ to support its merchandising system. The Container Store, with locations in 15 markets across the country, showcases more than 10,000 innovative storage and organization products designed to help people save valuable space and time.

MicroStrategy was selected by The Container Store to convert large volumes of merchandise data into actionable information for store buyers. From their desktop, The Container Store buyers can easily access SKU data via an extranet and then segment inventory purchased by store, by time, and by product. With MicroStrategy, The Container Store users are able to make well-informed business decisions such as what products to retain in inventory and what products to retire. In addition, the information helps buyers to identify emerging trends in materials, color palettes, and styles. The Container Store also uses daily exception-based reports, a self-service reporting system at the store and buyer level that alerts users to situations when they need to take action.

Discussion

“With our daily merchandise reports, we gain a competitive edge over other retailers who wait for weekly or month-end reports,” said Beth Gonzalez, Merchandise Systems Director of The Container Store. “MicroStrategy gives our buyers and executives an up-to-date picture of our business and enables us to better understand what we sell, when we sell it, and where we sell it, which ultimately influences our high levels of customer service. Our buyers count on this information to make knowledgeable decisions about when to add or retire products, which has a positive impact on our bottom line.”

The Container Store, the nation's originator and leading retailer of storage and organization products, currently has 38 locations across the country and has been named to FORT UNE ® magazine's annual list of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” for the past eight years. The Container Store offers free closet design services every day in its stores and online using elfa, the premiere shelving and drawer system. Sales for fiscal year 2006 are projected at an excess of $500 million. The Container Store is privately held.

Services As An Area Of Study: A Multidisciplinary Evolution

Contemporary academic interest in services—conceptualizing services and related theory building, as well as how to measure customer satisfaction with services—blossomed during the late 1970s (as opposed to much earlier definitions and commentary on service in organizational sociology and economics). The emergent interest focused on how goods differed from services and grew out of a multidisciplinary perspective comprising marketing, organizational behavior, industrial and organizational psychology, and operations management. This multidisciplinary approach underscores how all functions in an organization must work together to satisfy a customer.

The three disciplines contributed to a specification of how the prototypical “pure” service (such as education in the classroom) differs from the prototypical “pure” good (such as a television set) in both production, consumption, and consumer evaluation processes. Compared with goods, services are typically described as possessing relative intangibility, hetero-geneity, perishability, inseparability of production ...