8.1 Precision marketing common practices In this section, we discuss the common practices to be followed when using the IBM Management Center for WebSphere Commerce tooling for precision marketing. The tools are flexible and allow you to create various activities for your business needs. However, there are certain common practices that are to be followed to ensure that the performance is not hindered in any way. If you follow these guidelines, there is minimal impact on your system when the activities are activated. Enable and configure command caching. Command caching can improve the performance of the Marketing tool by storing the results of Web service calls that load the business objects to display to the customer. By doing so, this limits the amount of redundant queries that need to be performed on the database. Instead of querying the database each time, the data can be retrieved from the command cache, which improves response time as well as reduces the system load. For more information and instructions on how to set up command caching, see the WebSphere Commerce Version 7 Information Center: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wchelp/v7r0m0/topic/com.ibm .commerce.admin.doc/concepts/cdcmarcaccomcac.htm