Distributing magazines more intelligently

A large magazine distributor in the United Kingdom has initiated an enterprisewide data improvement program, focusing first on enhancing retail business intelligence for its copy management and supply management processes. With 180 magazine titles, Frontline sells an estimated 8.5 million copies per week in the United Kingdom through 55,000 retail outlets.

Because the magazines are distributed on a sale-or-return basis, Frontline constantly calculates the most profitable volume and mix of titles to deliver to each outlet. To tackle that task more effectively, Frontline selected the Harte-Hanks Trillium Software suite, which includes 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, says, "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 maximize sales while minimizing waste. 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."

According to a recent press release from Trillium, Frontline receives retail outlet data each week as a live data feed from wholesalers to its Oracle database. Inaccurate records often prevented new data from being matched to existing records, causing a considerable amount of manual data quality checking. By automating the process, Frontline expects to improve data quality, record matching and supply intelligence.

Whitehead says, "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 good source data will be essential to the cost-effective, on-time delivery of the project."