Location Is Everything

Mergers and acquisitions continue to disrupt the accuracy of data across the consumer goods industry. In order to regain and also retain data accuracy, forward-thinking companies are exploring a multitude of ways to keep business on track. The area of location information management (LIM), for example, is one overlooked data segment that a rising number of consumer goods firms are trumpeting as a vital enabler to gain competitive advantage.

How does the industry define LIM? According to ACNielsen, by combining location information with additional intelligence about their customers, LIM combines rich location content with related business processes, people and technology into a comprehensive strategy that enables effective utilization, delivery and measurement of location information to improve business performance and create a long-term competitive advantage. In short, location information is the complete set of structured attributes and cross-location relationships to fully describe a location.

Effervescent Information

Companies such as Cadbury-Schweppes, whose brands include Dr. Pepper and 7UP, are beefing up their IT infrastructures, business applications and internal procedures to leverage LIM data across multiple touch points. Cadbury's U.S. Direct Store Delivery business for beverages requires accurate timely information regarding retailer locations to ensure accurate franchise information and seamless delivery of price information in advance of delivery. Prior to the company's implementation of TDLinx, sales personnel were required to obtain retailer store lists, often hard copy, which were then manually input into the company's system. On average, store location information for retailers was updated twice a year at that point.

Today, Cadbury-Schweppes receives monthly data feeds from TDLinx, which is mapped to the company's legacy system and initiated to update the location information in an automated fashion.

"For the vast majority of our convenience and grocery retail chains, we no longer have to collect store lists from our sales teams, and have location information that is updated monthly," says Kevin Dooney, vice president, Sales Technology, Cadbury-Schweppes. "We are using the data in the beverages and confectionary divisions, but it feeds different legacy systems. It is used by Category Management, Customer Marketing, Brand Marketing, Sales, Operations and Supply Chain, to varying degrees."

Bubbling with Benefits

Some of the benefits Cadbury-Schweppes has mined from TDLinx include the ability to increase the accuracy of its retailer location information while decreasing the time spent by sales teams acquiring the data for more than 50 percent of its active retail customers. This has boosted the company's ability to effectively electronically communicate with retailers, which has increased efficiencies and effectiveness throughout the supply chain.

"The data has also increased our understanding of our customers and the markets in which they compete," says Dooney. "We have used the data along with Spectra to increase our understanding of consumer behavior in a store to help our customers make more informed category and customer marketing decisions in the future."

Dooney says data generated from TDLinx will play a key role in GDS initiatives to facilitate party and price synchronization for the next few years, as GLN's evolve.

"We are using the location data provided by TDLinx as our starting point for our retailer customer hierarchy," says Dooney. "We will enhance and add to their base data as required to meet our future needs."

Keeping LIM Top of Mind

According to Scott Taylor, executive vice president, TDLinx, getting the word out about location information is still a challenge. "What we're helping them understand is that this is a real, official problem," says Taylor. "Companies tend to not even realize that is a big enough problem that it has a name."

Taylor says his clients typically understand the power of LIM during the implementation cycle when the customer master is fed into the TDLinx system and a detailed report highlights the various inaccuracies -- from inconsistent spellings and missing locations to an inability to see indirect relationships. After problems are identified, TDLinx kicks into hierarchy maintenance, a process that cleans current data and catches problem areas early to enable a consistent view across all parties. For instance, retail customers listed as both Sam's Club and Wal-Mart or Food Lion and Hannaford should be consolidated under one of the names. Obviously, different departments require different needs, another area that TDLinx addresses.

"The Direct-store-delivery people have a different set of problems from the three tier companies who have different problems from distribution," says Taylor. "All three areas are very different and that's really how we segment the world."