Shop Till You Drop

Shop Till You Drop Too much choice can be paralyzing, as companies in the market for E-procurement software are finding out. Even measured by Internet time, E-procurement is a fast-moving target, with longtime players and freshly minted competitors offering new products and services almost daily....

By Scott Leibs • June 1, 2000

Slow Connection

Corporations and individuals wanting to finance their purchase of Gateway computers once faced an obstacle course of credit applications and credit checks. The five-hour process, though brief by some standards, nevertheless kept San Diego-­based Gateway Inc. from sending phone orders instantly to...

By Roy Harris • June 1, 2000

Explore the Trendline➔

The CFO Strategy for Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence’s impact on the office of the CFO continues to evolve, and finance chiefs must be aware of the opportunities it will create for growth. 

By CFO.com staff

Shop Till You Drop

Too much choice can be paralyzing, as companies in the market for E-procurement software are finding out. Even measured by Internet time, E-procurement is a fast-moving target, with longtime players and freshly minted competitors offering new products and services almost daily. Designed to simpli...

By Scott Leibs • June 1, 2000

Waiting for the Dough

No New Economy CFO is going to tell you that profits don’t matter. You might hear that market share, revenues, or brand awareness matters more. Or that the first priority is to fine-tune the business model for scalability and leverage. Or that the company could turn profitable in the current quar...

By Stephen Barr • June 1, 2000

THE SHIPPING NEWS

Toysrus.com wasn’t the first company to lose its way in the brave new world of online retailing, but it was certainly one of the best known. Blessed with a famous brand, the virtual arm of the giant toy-store chain seemed ready last November to take the E-commerce world by storm, wowing parents w...

By Bronwyn Fryer • June 1, 2000

Cash Burn Marks

Live by the sword, die by the sword. That’s what a slew of once-hot dot-coms are finding out, as their cash runs out and their stocks tank. Yesterday’s darlings of the capital markets, formerly flush with cash and an inflated stock price, are getting vitally interested in finding new funding sour...

By Kris Frieswick • June 1, 2000

Something in the Air

April may have been the cruelest month for Nasdaq, but in the very week that investors learned that Internet stocks are not immune to reality, a telecom megamerger fueled what may be the newest new thing: wireless communication. Bell Atlantic Corp. completed its joint-venture agreement with Vodap...

By Scott Leibs • June 1, 2000

Baan In Dutch

The year 2000 dawned with surprisingly benign impact on the computer networks of businesses around the world. But for Baan Co., the world’s fifth-largest supplier of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, the new millennium is off to a dismal start. On January 4, the Barneveld, Netherlands- ...

By Andrew Osterland • May 1, 2000

Searching For Answers

The Internet has already transformed the workplace by making huge amounts of information available, but a few minutes spent clicking away at various search engines often results in a mass of disorganized and irrelevant data. Many companies are now looking at ways to provide customized portals tha...

By John Xenakis • May 1, 2000

Spin Control

In some ways, you could call it a no-brainer. Playboy Enterprises Inc. wants to spin off its money-losing Web division. The move will generate capital to run the new E-division and get its ongoing development costs off Playboy’s books. Moreover, says CFO Linda Havard, the company will attract new...

By Kris Frieswick • May 1, 2000

Spin Control

In some ways, you could call it a no-brainer. Playboy Enterprises Inc. wants to spin off its money-losing Web division. The move will generate capital to run the new E-division and get its ongoing development costs off Playboy’s books. Moreover, says CFO Linda Havard, the company will attract new...

By Kris Frieswick • May 1, 2000

CRM: Saving Private Buying

In March 2000, the Information Technology Association of America, or ITAA (www.itaa.org) sent a letter to William Daley, the US Secretary of Commerce. In it, the business and technology organization essentially advised the Department of Commerce to think twice about adopting new measures that wou...

By Bronwyn Fryer • April 15, 2000

Wireless: Other Platforms, Other Rules

As DHL’s global electronic commerce strategy manager, Brussels-based Colum Joyce knows a thing or two about changes in technology. Thirteen years ago, DHL (www.dhl.com) management asked a global group, including Joyce, to devise a strategy to help keep the company current with cutting-edge busine...

By Louella Miles • April 15, 2000

E-tailers and Space Invaders

Barely a year old, Drugstore.com (www.drugstore.com) has been hailed as the biggest and most successful online pharmacy on the Internet. Since the Bellevue, Washington, startup opened for business in February 1999, its revenues have climbed steadily. For the fourth quarter of 1999, Drugstore.com ...

By Randy Myers • April 15, 2000

Internet Explorers

The well-worn axiom “time is money” manifests itself in surprising ways. In the 1800s, the Rothschild brothers built their vast financial empire in part with a private courier service that allowed them to get vital information faster than their competitors. Later, they used carrier pigeons to tra...

By Scott Leibs • April 15, 2000

The Great PC Giveaway

In 1914, Henry Ford reduced employee turnover at his young company by doubling wages to an unprecedented $5 a day, a move other manufacturers were forced to follow. In February, Ford Motor Co. raised the stakes for employers again. The Dearborn, Mich.-based auto giant announced it would offer a p...

By Tim Reason • April 1, 2000

Fly Me to the Web

If you have any doubt whether travel and entertainment (T&E) expense management software can save companies a lot of money, talk to Mark McAndrews. “We needed something to automate our system,” recalls McAndrews, chief operating officer at Merrill Lynch & Co., in New York.The 1,000 or so ...

By John P. Mello Jr. • March 1, 2000

Techwatch

I Sold My Company on the Internet What have you put in a Web shopping cart lately? A few books or CDs? Office supplies? A winter parka, maybe? If you visit MergerNetwork.com (w ww.mergernetwork.com), you can drop a $100 million business in your cart, with the click of a mouse.Well, not quite. Wha...

By Edward Teach • March 1, 2000

Via Vivant

Any CIO can tell you how hard it is to find IT help these days. Web, networking, and ERP skills are in high demand and short supply. Constant turnover is the rule, as techies go where the coolest technology or most lucrative stock options are. Nearly 350,000 IT positions remained unfilled in 1998...

By Edward Teach • Feb. 1, 2000

Nothing But Net

Y2K giveth, and Y2K taketh away. The Year 2000 problem was a bonanza for the major enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendors in 1997 and 1998, as many companies replaced their noncompliant legacy software with new ERP systems. But that windfall petered out in 1999. Many companies even e...

By John Xenakis • Feb. 1, 2000

From Soup To E-Nuts

Like the founders of a lot of Web-based start- ups, Larry Gerhard and Michael Osborn were passionate about their product, but not about the technology required to sell it. In their case, the product was wine. Gerhard and Osborn, who both have plenty of experience in high tech, wanted to open a wi...

By Kris Frieswick • Feb. 1, 2000

The World Is Enough

Smallish Ratner Steel Co. used to have trouble getting noticed by the $700 billion global steel industry. The Minneapolis-based company, with $12 million in annual revenues, processes steel coil into sheets for sale to fabricators and welders.Because of its modest size, however, it was invisible ...

By Russ Banham • Jan. 1, 2000

Delivering the Goods

During the recent holiday season, Internet businesses hoped to avoid the ghost of Christmas past–the 1998 horror show in which E-tailers ran out of some products, couldn’t ship others in time, and offered ghastly customer service overall. Many online companies have since spent large sums toward i...

By John P. Mello Jr. • Jan. 1, 2000

Blaming ERP

Last July was a hot month in Pennsylvania, but the IT managers at Hershey Foods Corp. headquarters, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, were feeling a different kind of heat. For the past three years, they and four different teams of consultants had been working on a massive enterprise resource planning (E...

By Andrew Osterland • Jan. 1, 2000

Panning for Internet Gold

Data warehousing, a cluster of technologies that can deliver dazzling insights to decision makers and chronic headaches to IT staffers, has found a fertile new field of application: the World Wide Web. A small but growing number of companies are using “webhousing” to analyze the enormous volumes ...

By Edward Teach • Dec. 1, 1999