This is the place to discuss the episodes of the Comic Book Page podcast, the Comic Book Page website or pretty much anything else of interest to the Comic Book Page community...
Trev wrote:Crazy that they are both in Indiana. There's a diamond pick up point in San Antonio. Makes we want to start an online biz for the western half of the US that builds on that model. Who'd like to get their books a couple of days earlier?
Opening a Western branch in a solid "hub city" is something that the DCBS/HC folks should consider, though I'm not sure if there is a solid business case for this. Seems like the benefit of running a mailorder business is to be able to hit all your customers from a single hub. I guess it comes down to how much extra business would a company get by offering faster shipping to the West.
If only Diamond would start a drop ship business to cater to online retailers. . .
They already have the physical infrastructure, they just need to figure out the business model. There's probably something in Diamond's contracts that prevents this, though. Protections for the brick and mortar businesses.
Trev wrote:I would, however, believe that the processes at DCBS aren't yet mature enough for them to take on UPS and Fedex as options.
On the DCBS processes are not mature enough front, I think that is wrong.
I'll bet you that whatever programming changes are required for this will force more maturity on the DCBS processes. They would be wise to consider that this may happen again (either via the market forces or via another business decision DCBS makes). When it does, I'll bet you their code and processes are more prepared and it takes less time to make a change.
That's process maturity.
I'm not saying they don't know what they are doing, I'm saying they haven't been around long enough and so this kind of change will take them longer than a company with more mature processes.
Trev wrote:
I'll bet you that whatever programming changes are required for this will force more maturity on the DCBS processes. They would be wise to consider that this may happen again (either via the market forces or via another business decision DCBS makes). When it does, I'll bet you their code and processes are more prepared and it takes less time to make a change.
That's process maturity.
I'm not saying they don't know what they are doing, I'm saying they haven't been around long enough and so this kind of change will take them longer than a company with more mature processes.
While I agree with you, I'd be interested to hear what comics retailer you think has those mature processes? I don't think comics retailing is a stronghold of mature SW processes. Heck, you'd be surprised at how pitifully immature the SW processes are at a lot of Fortune 500 companies.
All I'm saying is that I understand why there is a lag to DCBS reacting to the change, and I suspect they will get better over time. The downside of automation (that is not done in a really flexible fashion) is that it is rigid and will not be resilient to change. DCBS is facing that now. They don't have an IT Dept. They have a guy that does some programming for them
Trev wrote:
I'll bet you that whatever programming changes are required for this will force more maturity on the DCBS processes. They would be wise to consider that this may happen again (either via the market forces or via another business decision DCBS makes). When it does, I'll bet you their code and processes are more prepared and it takes less time to make a change.
That's process maturity.
I'm not saying they don't know what they are doing, I'm saying they haven't been around long enough and so this kind of change will take them longer than a company with more mature processes.
While I agree with you, I'd be interested to hear what comics retailer you think has those mature processes? I don't think comics retailing is a stronghold of mature SW processes. Heck, you'd be surprised at how pitifully immature the SW processes are at a lot of Fortune 500 companies.
All I'm saying is that I understand why there is a lag to DCBS reacting to the change, and I suspect they will get better over time. The downside of automation (that is not done in a really flexible fashion) is that it is rigid and will not be resilient to change. DCBS is facing that now. They don't have an IT Dept. They have a guy that does some programming for them
Yep, I totally agree. Hell, most comics retailers don't even have a POS system yet. Certainly from a tech point of view the processes of any small business probably aren't very mature.
The best I've seen so far is probably mycomicshop.
Trev wrote:
The best I've seen so far is probably mycomicshop.
I'm not so sure about MCS, either. They are completely incapable of making ANY change to an order once it has been entered (other than canceling it completely), and once it is canceled, it can take over a week for the books you canceled to be back in their on-line inventory.
I saw this from experience one time when I noticed I ordered a book I already had. They could not remove that 1 book from my order and had to cancel the whole thing. It was about a week before the other cancelled books on my order made their way back into inventory so I could re-do the order without the canceled book. This does not indicate a very flexible/mature process.
My shipment arrived today. So far that is Monday on two of the four weeks and Tuesday on two of the weeks. Both weeks the package arrived on Tuesday seem to be due to the Thanksgiving holiday.
