Frontline, the UK's largest magazine distributor, is
deploying a newsupply chain intelligence systemto
trim costs.
The company, which is owned by four of the UK's best-known
publishers - EMAP,
BBC Worldwide, Haymarket Media and Bauer Publishing - is using
the
Trillium software system from Harte-Hanks Trillium
Software.
It 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 about 8.5 million
copies per week in the UK, through more than 55,000 retail
outlets.
As the magazines are distributed on a sale-or-return basis,
Frontline must constantly 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.
Nicola Whitehead, data development manager at Frontline, said,
"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. But 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 is seeking to improve data
quality, record matching and supply intelligence, and also expects
to reduce manual data quality administration costs.
Whitehead said, "We needed 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 a good source data will be essential to the
cost-effective, on-time delivery of the project."