The issues that companies face when they decide to build a solution in house are numerous: Scarce development resources, project cost overruns, delivery delays, unexpected technical issues, long-term maintenance issues. For these reasons, you should consider purchasing hosted, flexible, "out-of-the-box" vendor managed inventory (VMI) and web-based inventory solutions that can be running in five days, all at a fixed monthly price - with no delays, low risk and a lower total cost of ownership.

At Invendia we've often seen companies struggle with decision to buy a technology or to build that solution in-house. The decision criteria typically are:

•Availability of qualified development resources •Long-term maintenance staffing •Implementation time and costs •Project risk •Process understanding •3rd party objectivity

So, what are top six reasons to buy rather than build an inventory management solution?

6. Availability of qualified development resources. If you have available resources that are experienced in developing web-based, distributed solutions then you should consider building your own solution in house. In addition, your staff should ideally be knowledgeable about leveraging development standards such as J2EE or .NET. If not, you should source an off-the-shelf solution that can readily integrate with your existing applications. 5. Long term maintenance staffing. Once you have a solution, how are you going to keep it current, from both a technology and from a process point-of-view? For example, in last few years RFID, collaboration, wireless and countless other developments have forced companies to update their processes. With ever increasing innovations, you need to ensure that you are staffed to manage not only system upgrades but any errors that you may discover. If you either don't have staffing for this or don't want headache, then you should consider a "bought and maintained" solution.

1. On Internet content is king and always will be. This is because Internet is information superhighway and most people use it for information of some sort. The information on a website is its content. Generally more useful and interesting content a website has more successful it will be. This is because more people will want to visit it again and again, this is especially true if a website is constantly adding more and more content on a regular basis be it blogs, articles, tutorials, news and opinion or whatever. Search engines love sites that are constantly adding fresh content, they tend to spider those sites more often. Some websites add so much content to their site they get spidered almost daily! An example is Backpage.com, you can place an ad on their site and somtimes it will be indexed very next day. So my advice to you is learn more about content and ways of adding fresh content to your site and if you dont own your own website, advertise on websites that ad content daily! This will get your ads indexed by search engines very quickly.

2. Next up is keywords and how to use them. Whenever you post to forums, blogs, link exchanges, enzines, ad boards, ffa list or any other type of site you submit your ads or articles to , make sure you put your keywords for your site in your title and description! If you only have an affiliate site ask owner of program for keywords he uses to list site or use a keyword tool from overture or wordtracker to find keywords and phrases that people would use to find your site. Your keywords should also be used in title and body of any articles you submit for publication on other websites. Search engines love content and it should be keyword RICH, I can not emphasize this enough.