Tool Box
Issue No. 10 - April/May 2003
Marketing Services in Real Time
by Dr David Corkindale
A recent issue of the Gartner organisation's online Newsletter (www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=382648) focussed upon what it called The Real-Time Enterprise. It claimed that the ability to operate this way would increasingly become a source of competitive advantage and also that slow operational processes incur additional inventory costs and can cause loss of sales if goods can not be delivered on schedule. Gartner's business is IT and their emphasis was on the nature of the systems that need to be implemented to deliver real-time capabilities. Marketing's need to benefits from real-time operation was not addressed much. Let's look at what some are and could be.
Examples of real-time services would be EFTPOS and Wavewatch (wavewatch.com.au), which has cameras focussed on the surf 24 hours a day as opposed to a telephone-based service that records a report twice a day. Another example is the furniture shop that allows you to sit with a salesperson in front of the computer screen and custom design, within some limits, your version of a sofa. When you have decided the final design the 'enter' key is pressed and in the warehouse at the back the materials to assemble your sofa are packed up and you drive around and pick up the self-assembly kit. Some real-time operations have been with us for a very long time, for example, the telephone. The prospect of being able to offer information services in real-time over the (mobile) phone lured many of the world's biggest telcos into paying billions for licences to do this via WAP and 3G. Unfortunately, so far this has mostly been a capability looking for a real use as consumers have not taken up these services except in Japan where, for instance, you can use your mobile phone on the freeway to 'look ahead' and see on your screen the state of traffic flow from a camera above a junction some kilometres away that is notorious for traffic jams.
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