Features

T ACOMA, Wash. — Labor Ready, the global temporary staffing firm that finds jobs for blue-collar workers where they live, may be a model for employers that need to fill work-force vacancies quickly.     With 770 offices in the United States, 35 in Canada and 20 in the United Kingdom, Labor Ready is the world’s […]

San Jose, Calif., took first place in Yahoo! Internet Life magazine’s annual ranking of the most wired cities, knocking San Francisco to the No. 2 spot. D espite all of the hullabaloo about the energy scare and lack of labor, U.S. DataPort chose to locate a US$1.2 billion, 1,100-job Internet campus in Silicon Valley — […]

C annes, FRANCE — Europe is sprouting a daisy chain of real estate Web sites likely to move much of the corporate real estate sector online continentwide in a bare few years. Typical of the fragmented linguistic patchwork of markets, each country is developing its own national approach. But from Viking “full-market access” to Gallic […]

I f they look alike, smell alike, sound alike, then they must be the same, right? Not exactly. Though Canada and the United States are similar in many ways, they are not identical, especially when it comes to labor laws. Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart found that out the hard way.         After entering […]

“W e really haven’t started to see the entire impact from the NAFTA agreement,” says Jim Bruce, a consultant with Flur Daniel in Atlanta.         The NAFTA agreement is eight years old, but there are new components of the trade agreement equation that have business on all sides of the U.S. and […]

“O ur government is very proud of the international trade success stories we have here in our own backyard,” says Ted Chudleigh, parliamentary assistant to the Ontario minister of economic development and trade.         Ontario has a great deal to boast about. The Canadian province is the powerful engine behind Canada’s trade […]

New Partnership To Supply Benchmarking Data The CB Richard Ellis Call Center Solutions Group (www.cbre.com), Phoenix, has formed a partnership with Dr. John Anton, an e-business expert at the Purdue University Center for Customer-Driven Quality and BenchmarkPortal, Inc., a call center benchmarking firm (www.BenchmarkPortal.com). “As our two groups join forces, we will analyze and evaluate […]

D espite the prolonged shakeout among occupants of commercial real estate Internet “space,” not all Web services catering to the industry are floundering. Indeed, observers of the market at its height all predicted the shakeout, and the economic slowdown has underscored its impact. It’s not that there isn’t a role for the Internet in the […]

M ONTGOMERY COUNTY, Md. — Can the building blocks of life become the foundation of a new economy? They can if the companies mapping the human genome happen to be in your own backyard.         In Rockville, Md., Celera Genomics Group captivated the attention of the scientific world on Feb. 12 when […]

R IO RANCHO, N.M. – Driving along the highway from Albuquerque, N.M., to suburban Rio Rancho to the north, the first thing one notices hovering over the town is the giant corporate edifice of the Intel Corp.         Dominating the city landscape like the majestic Sandia Mountains to the east, Intel’s sprawling, […]

RIO RANCHO, N.M. — S itting on a hillside perch overlooking this town just north of Albuquerque, the 5,500-employee Intel Corp. campus casts an imposing shadow over the area economy.         That shadow is about to grow even larger, as Intel (www.intel.com) embarks on a US$2 billion, 1,000-worker expansion of its semiconductor […]

Abstracts of major presentations of the International Development Research Council (IDRC), the world’s preeminent corporate real estate association. “Service Models for the New Economy,” Florida World Congress, Nov. 6, 2000:         Attendees in a theme program heard about how two corporations – ExxonMobil Corp. and Lucent Technologies – structure their corporate real […]

N on-European firms seeking to establish a call center in Europe faced relatively few obstacles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They opened individual centers in whichever countries they felt the need to be in. By today’s standards, the centers were generally low-tech, and the notion of networking multiple centers had yet to catch […]

A TLANTA — When Nortel Networks announced Feb. 15 that it would eliminate 10,000 jobs — or more than 10 percent of its global work force of 94,500 — it was further evidence that the economic slowdown had spread beyond the dot-coms.         The dreaded “L” word — layoffs — had reached […]

Editor’s Note: The following report was prepared by Jan Smit, senior consultant for International Location Advisory Services at Ernst & Young in London (jsmit@cc.ernsty.co.uk). G ermany is the economic powerhouse of Europe. It has a highly educated population, registers a high percentage of European patents and overall presents an interesting proposition to high tech-inward investors. […]

N EW YORK — Sweden defended its ranking this year as the world’s dominant information economy, according to the 2001 International Data Corp. (IDC)/World Times Information Society Index (ISI).         For the second straight year, the ISI ranked Sweden No. 1 in the ability to access and absorb information and information technology. […]

T he California blackouts and the state’s continuing electricity crisis took center stage at the IOU-EDA Winter Forum, held on Feb. 21-23 in San Diego, and these problems bring to the surface an important question for site selectors: Will utilities in a deregulated market be capable of providing the service my company needs? Many technology […]

A s globalization accelerates, obliging firms to maximize operational flexibility, the U.S.-led sale-and-lease-back craze is spreading to Europe. Firms are rushing to minimize commitment to fixed assets and re-engineer corporate real estate portfolios to generate more funds for their core business.         Says Denis Kavanagh, international director corporate finance Jones Lang LaSalle, […]

I s Bernard Landry, Quebec’s new Premier, controversial? Of course he is. A separatist? Definitely. But in his radio address heard around the world about Canada’s “uselessness” in terms of Quebec’s economic development, there was an underlying message that should be music to the ears of corporate investors.         Landry (right), the […]

W hat a difference a few years can make. Ten years ago, Mexico, by most accounts, was a third-world country. But since the opening of North American trade through NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), Mexico has become a fast-growing economy and a much-sought-after spot for corporate locations.         In fact, Mexico […]

W ASHINGTON — It didn’t take long for President Bush to face his first “crisis” in the Oval Office — how to deal with California’s widespread energy shortages.         One group that hopes Bush acts quickly is the Building Owners and Managers Assoc. International (BOMA), the nation’s largest lobbying organization for corporate […]

Serviced Office Provider Sets Franchising Plan R egus Business Centres (www.regus.com), a major provider of serviced office space, is introducing a franchising plan for select organizations and individuals. Franchise owners can create their own office environment, letting them use the space their business requires while devoting the remainder of their workspace to income generation.   […]

O ne theme underlying Jones Lang LaSalle’s Corporate Real Estate Leadership Forum in October 2000 was the similarity of experiences among real estate managers no matter where they are based. Crafting effective relationships with business units remains a top priority of all, for example, as do managing shareholder expectations and balancing time pressures. Another common […]

M illions of dollars of sales can be earned by timely delivery of an e-business facility–or lost if the effort gets mired in delay. Herein lies the importance finance and operations management place on accelerating the start date for billing of services. Although lowest facility delivery cost may feel increasing pressure in 2001, management’s overriding […]