Distribution

One of the aims of any distributor is how best to achieve reduced inventory costs.  With multiple warehouses and suppliers the ability to track inventory and gain visibility at every level is paramount. Maintaining the correct, appropriate inventory gives the ability to take advantage of sales opportunities, optimize supply chain and improve decision making.

Benefits of Data Quality within Distribution and Logistics

The quality of data in the distribution industry is of primary importance. Data quality affects the whole of the operation from suppliers to customer. It can:

• Create sales opportunities  

• Help eliminate overpayments

• Shorten the order to payment process

Application of Data Quality in Distribution and Logistics

The Product Information Management (PIM) system is loaded with re-engineered data. The re-engineering process consists of powerful functions that cannot be performed by the PIM system alone.  The data is consolidated and centralized, creating a single and consistent view of data flow.

Once cleansed, verified and validated, a data quality firewall should be implemented so as to prevent inaccurate and invalid data from ever reaching your catalog or database.

Powerful functions include:

• Consolidate data: With massive volumes of data from suppliers using different formats, different descriptions, from different systems, perhaps from around the world, a single source of truth for each item is essential for optimizing the supply chain.  
• Score and profile data: This ensures you know how reliable your data is. By scorecarding and creating KPI markers on your data, you can monitor where deficiencies occur and measure trends over time. This information is very valuable for shaping business strategy decisions.
• Standardize data: Where data is unstructured or in different formats you can extract and standardize product information, maintain standard references, such as unit of measure, and ensure that all product data is aligned.
• Validate data: Data can be validated against industry standards and master reference lists designed for your business requirements.
• Clean any errors: Dirty data affects the business operations performed using the data not least the searching for particular products. Cleansing the product information will, for example, correct invalid, contradictory and obsolete data during data entry or data migration.
• Deduplicate information: With standardized product information you can now eliminate duplication and achieve an accurate list of products held in stock.
  

Distribution Catalog Loading

Increase the speed of on boarding suppliers and introducing new products into your catalog. New items are loaded accurately, without duplication, transformed into standardized format even from remote, disparate sources. This can accelerate revenue generation by much faster time to market. Due to the speed of software in loading the data, labor costs can be reduced by 80%¹. ROI is approximately 10 weeks¹.

¹ In-house Research