The UK’s largest magazine distributor sets out to improve data quality to improve supply chain intelligence and increase sales whilst reducing waste
ALDERMASTON, UNITED KINGDOM – 20 August 2007 – Harte-Hanks Trillium Software (NYSE: HHS), a leading enabler of Total Data Quality solutions, today announced Frontline Limited of Peterborough, UK, as a new customer implementation of the Trillium Software System®. Frontline is the largest magazine distributor in the UK and is owned by four of the UK’s best-known publishers; EMAP plc, BBC Worldwide, Haymarket Media and Bauer Publishing.
Frontline has embarked on an enterprise-wide data quality improvement programme, with an initial focus on improving retail business intelligence for its copy management and supply management processes. Frontline’s 180-plus magazine titles sell some 8.5 million copies per week in the UK through 55,000-plus retail outlets. As the magazines are distributed on a sale-or-return basis, Frontline constantly must calculate the most profitable volume and mix of titles to deliver to each outlet. Frontline selected the full Trillium Software System suite of products, among them TS Discovery for profiling and data analysis, TS Quality for data cleansing and enrichment, and TS Insight for data quality monitoring.
“Given today’s competitive retail environment, we must supply the optimum title mix and copy numbers to each individual outlet to meet its typical customer demand, avoid stock-outs and maximise sales whilst minimising waste,” said Nicola Whitehead, data development manager at Frontline. “Using TS Discovery to profile our data, we have been able to identify areas for attention and have recently started to improve the data using TS Quality. We will soon implement TS Insight as our dashboard to monitor data quality over time.”
Frontline receives retail outlet data each week as a live data feed from wholesalers to its Oracle database. According to the company, inaccuracies in Frontline’s records often prevented new data being matched to existing records which accounted for considerable effort in manual data quality checking. By automating this process, Frontline seeks to improve data quality, record matching and supply intelligence significantly, and also expects to reduce manual data quality administration costs.
“We selected the Trillium Software System in our plans to centralise data governance,” Whitehead said. “We need a solution to deploy against data right across the enterprise; data of multiple types and from a variety of systems. A major systems migration is planned in the near future and good source data will be essential to the cost-effective, on-time delivery of the project.”
“While some competing solutions may operate well at the departmental level and on specific types of data, the Trillium Software System enables organisations to achieve data quality right across their enterprise operations,” said Ed Wrazen, vice president for international marketing at Harte-Hanks Trillium Software. “With high data quality, businesses can add to their bottom line through reduced costs and improved business performance. We are delighted to welcome Frontline as a client and as a company that understands the value of Total Data Quality.”
