Frontline Chooses Trillium Software for Supply Chain Data Quality

August 21, 2007; 12:36 AM

ALDERMASTON, UNITED KINGDOM – Harte-Hanks Trillium Software (NYSE: HHS), a leading enabler of Total Data Quality solutions, today announced Frontline Limited of Peterborough, UK, as a new customer implementation of the Trillium Software System®.  Frontline is the largest magazine distributor in the UK and is owned by four of the UK's best-known publishers; EMAP plc, BBC Worldwide, Haymarket Media and Bauer Publishing.

Frontline 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 some 8.5 million copies per week in the UK through 55,000-plus retail outlets.  As the magazines are distributed on a sale-or-return basis, Frontline constantly must 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.

"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 maximise sales whilst minimising waste," said Nicola Whitehead, data development manager at Frontline.  "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.  According to the company, 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 seeks to improve data quality, record matching and supply intelligence significantly, and also expects to reduce manual data quality administration costs.

"We selected the Trillium Software System in our plans to centralise data governance," Whitehead said.  "We need 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."

"While some competing solutions may operate well at the departmental level and on specific types of data, the Trillium Software System enables organisations to achieve data quality right across their enterprise operations," said Ed Wrazen, vice president for international marketing at Harte-Hanks Trillium Software.  "With high data quality, businesses can add to their bottom line through reduced costs and improved business performance.  We are delighted to welcome Frontline as a client and as a company that understands the value of Total Data Quality."

About Frontline
http://www.frontline.ltd.uk/profile.asp

Frontline sells and distributes over 180 of our Partners' magazine titles, including 70 of the top 200 best selling titles in the UK. Our magazines sell nearly 8.5 million copies every week through 55,000 shops ranging from the smallest corner store to the biggest hypermarket. This makes us the biggest magazine distributor in the UK.

Frontline's job is to maximise the sales of our magazines in the most cost-effective way. To do this, we connect our Partner's knowledge of their readers with the retailers' understanding of their shoppers in order to develop effective strategies for driving category sales. We are also investing in sophisticated software solutions to ensure that we are getting the right magazines, in the right numbers, into the right shops.

Frontline employs nearly 200 people with over 100 of these based in our Peterborough offices. The talented people at Frontline make us the successful and influential business that we are. As the magazine industry enters a period of significant change, our people will continue to keep us at the forefront of industry thinking and will ensure the continued delivery of our objectives.

About Harte-Hanks

Harte-Hanks, Inc., San Antonio, TX, is a worldwide, direct and targeted marketing company that provides direct marketing services and shopper advertising opportunities to a wide range of local, regional, national and international consumer and business-to-business marketers.  Harte-Hanks Direct Marketing improves return on its clients' marketing investment by increasing their prospect and customer value – a process of "customer optimisation" –organised around five strategic considerations:  Information (data collection/management) — Opportunity (data access/utilisation) — Insight (data analysis/interpretation) — Engagement (knowledge application) — Interaction (program execution).  Visit the Harte-Hanks Web site at http://www.harte-hanks.com  or call (800) 456-9748 in the USA and in the United Kingdom call +44 (0) 1344 325500.  

Harte-Hanks Trillium Software enables organisations to achieve Total Data Quality by providing a full complement of technologies and services providing global data profiling, data cleansing, enhancement, and data linking for e-business, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, data warehouse, and other enterprise applications.  For more information about Trillium Software and its offerings, call (978) 436-8900 in the USA, +44 (0) 118 940 7666 in the UK, +49 7031 714 756 in Germany, or visit Trillium Software online at http://www.trilliumsoftware.com