Retailers wasting millions annually through process inefficiencies, lost sales due to shelf stockouts, and unnecessary costs of manually correcting errors
Cambridge, UK – 11 May 2010 - The poor quality of product data in the retail supply chain is eroding the profits of retailers and costing millions of pounds annually in lost sales through process inefficiencies, shelf stockouts and unnecessary costs of manual workarounds to source missing data and correct errors; not to mention the negative impact on brand reputation, compliance reporting and poor customer satisfaction ratings – according to data management specialists, Datanomic.
In particular, product harmonisation across multiple business areas, operating companies or even countries is proving especially challenging for supply chain managers. For many retailers, the cost of tracking and reconciling what products have been ordered, delivered, invoiced and paid for exceeds the cost of writing off errors and making duplicate payments.
“The limited amount of detail often provided by suppliers combined with a lack of rigorous standards used to describe products in the supply chain, such as on shelf edge labels and POS till receipts, makes it impossible to confidently track, match and report on SKU’s,” said Matthew Cawsey, Data Management Applications for the Retail Sector, Datanomic. “This means it’s cheaper for retailers to write off problems or pay invoices twice than it is to spend manual time and effort trying to discover those problems. It takes a huge amount of manual effort and re-keying to complete and validate records, which should really be an automated “protect & control” process when dealing with hundreds of thousands of line items.”
The recent Data Crunch Report from GS1 revealed that retailers are working with data that is inconsistent in well over 80 per cent of instances. The company calculates that this will cost the UK market more than £700 million in profit erosion and £300 million in lost sales over the next five years.
“This should be on the agenda at Board-level – it’s surprising that retailers are unnecessarily throwing away millions of pounds every year, especially during one of the most difficult recessions in recent history,” added Jeremy Lovett, Vice President Data Management Applications for Datanomic. “Accurate product data is the foundation of supply chain efficiency. The retail market is highly competitive, fast moving and changes rapidly. Margins and profits are under constant pressure as consumer spending curtails in an economic downturn, placing greater emphasis on margin protection and efficiency gains. The flow of information is crucial. With manual abbreviations, broken English, inconsistencies in item descriptions and multiple formats, many supply chain managers and CIOs have assumed that the data quality IT problem is simply too difficult and expensive to solve – it isn’t and we can prove it.”
Datanomic is directly addressing this issue by providing to supply chain managers, product marketers, risk managers, CIOs and other subject matter experts a cost effective solution to the multi-million pound retail industry problem.
Datanomic has used its enterprise-wide data management solution, dn:Director, to build a set of configurable data processes for retailers that immediately save money. It’s designed to help business managers take back control of their data and build a standardised, compliant and reliable “single view of product”.
Datanomic is offering selected retailers a free 90-minute onsite ‘QuickStats Workshop’ where, using a sample of a retailer’s own data with the dn:Director profiling and auditing processes, the workshop helps assess potential errors, inconsistencies and inaccuracies in data sets and provides suggestions for ways to immediately fix them to ensure data is fit for purpose. At the end of the session, participants receive a detailed Results Book of findings.
Retailers interested in participating can find out more at http://www.datanomic.com/quickstats
About Datanomic
Datanomic’s flagship enterprise Compliance Screening and Data Management software, dn:Director, helps organizations remain compliant with legislation, save money, streamline business processes, reduce waste and seize more opportunities. dn:Director’s broad capabilities enable organizations to identify and eradicate problems in customer, financial and product data, improve compliance performance and better manage business risk. Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with an office in New York, USA, Datanomic was founded in 2001. www.datanomic.com
For further information, please contact:
Jeremy Jones
Datanomic Ltd
Tel: +44 (0) 1223 228418
Email: jeremy.jones@datanomic.com
Vanessa Land
Devonshire Marketing (PR for Datanomic)
Tel: + 44 (0)870 242 7469
Email: vanessa@devonshiremarketing.com