RN January/February08Karen Meenan’s Top Tips ●
customers for this niche title or you can cancel completely. Either way, the new quantity you advise on the web page is the actual amount which will be delivered to your store. At last! A supplier who will give retailers what we want – the titles we want in the quantities we want – or not - as the case may be!
The Catch Now for the catch – if you do not log onto the EMND website every day and do not check what is destined for your store in two days time – then you have lost your opportunity to manage your newsagency and a selection of newspaper and magazine titles in amounts decided by the wholesaler will be delivered to you as before… you have been warned. If you have not already got internet access in your store (you don’t necessarily need broadband access, but this does speed things up considerably), contact Clearwire, Eircom, BT or any other internet provider today and make your back office life easier. You will get a detailed Retailer Pack direct from EMND which will detail specific examples of paperwork and procedures prior to the launch of the joint venture, detailing all the changes – but here is a summary of other changes afoot.
The Daily Approach EMND paperwork will change – you will now get a daily costed delivery note and a daily recall note. Fantastic! In all the courses I give around the country about how to maximise profit in the newsagency, the same question comes up each time: “what day is the best day to do returns?” I always reply, “every day”. If you approach the newsagency department the same way as you approach cash, then the reason becomes very clear. You count tills after every shift and do a trial balance every day to ensure that till differences are managed to within your specified limit – say plus/minus €3 per day. If you have €50 missing from a particular shift, you take steps to recover this loss immediately (count coin station, search drop boxes,
check cameras etc) until you find the €50 note. Similarly, if you manage your newsagency (both magazines and newspapers) on a daily basis, treating new arrivals each day as fresh stock and culling older titles to make room for fresher titles each day, then the likelihood of having late returns or returns to the incorrect supplier is eliminated. If you see an error on Wednesday, the day the invoice is delivered to your store, you have a chance to spot that error and take steps to recover the money that same day. If you leave the task of “doing” all the newsagency returns on one day – say Saturday or Sunday, as many retailers do – then you fall into a trap of the equivalent of trying to balance a week’s worth of cash on one day – an impossible task! So a daily costed delivery note and a daily recall note from EMND is very welcome indeed. In addition to this, EMND has an aspiration to move towards daily uplift of full copy returns of both newspapers and magazines for all customers through 2008. Now this category is getting easier to manage on a daily basis – fresh stock comes in every day and old stock is returned every day: for all the older retailers out there, it will remind you of putting out the milk bottles every night!
Significant Investment So how will EMND handle all this extra workload? Significant investment is being made in this new company EM News Distribution – from state-of-the-art allocation tools for newspapers and magazines, semiautomated packing technology (which will significantly reduce picking errors) and daily returns handling and processing, when this daily service is rolled out throughout the year.
Newspread to Distribute Independent Newspapers Meanwhile, since Monday January 28 (the same date as the launch date of EMND), Newspread are operating as Independent Newspaper’s appointed wholesaler. What this means is that the physical delivery of Independent Newspaper titles will continue as before – Newspread assures all its customers that there will be no impact on delivery times. If you discover a change in this, notify Newspread as soon as this occurs. The returns will be collected and processed as before – no changes here. The big changes will be that the customer service team will be responsible for all queries regarding deliveries and credits for both Independent Newspapers and for
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