Talk to anybody in retail and they will tell you that location is probably one of the most important factors for success. So why is it that the majority of marketers manage data with a focus solely on product or item information? Relying on product information alone often provides too narrow a focus when evaluating your business by key accounts, customers, trade channel or store-level activities such as merchandising, couponing and direct mail. To gain a competitive edge in the market, complete information—which must include location information— delivered in a systematic and repeatable process is an absolute necessity.

Right Product, Right Place, Right Time
When a new product comes off the manufacturing line for the first time, the Item Master file is updated, the product is assigned an SKU, and it is theoretically ready to be sold. But is the necessary information available for the point of sale? That begs the question as to whether you have properly addressed the location information data in order to have the right product at the right place at the right time. You lose revenue and market share every day that clean, accurate location data is not available to your business processes and applications. Why not address those basic needs?

Volatile Marketplace
Today’s openings, closings, acquisitions and mergers have forced enormous amounts of change in the marketplace. In order to compete and succeed, leading corporations are investigating new ways to maintain, integrate and leverage rich location information, combined with other key intelligence about their customers (retailers and on-premise outlets). Companies are enhancing their systems infrastructures and critical business applications and processes to more successfully aggregate, integrate, communicate and evaluate Location Information Management (LIM) data across internal touch points—including direct sales, indirect sales, call centers and brokers.

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.

Why Now?
If targeted delivery of highly relevant location information can return such tremendous value, why hasn’t it been on every executive’s to-do list? Over the past few years, a convergence of several factors has created an imperative to focus on location information now as never before:

• Focus on item information or product information
  management (PIM)
• Rapidly growing numbers of customer locations and need to use them in global data synchronization (GDS)
• Continuously changing landscape of the marketplace (channel/market churn)
• Increasing demand for accurate, complete location information at any time
• Expanding numbers of systems and files that contain critical location information
• Need for a methodology to integrate LIM data across an enterprise
• Evolution of GDS and electronic product code (EPC) drives the need for LIM as a core component.

The number of methods by which enterprises interact with customer locations has been growing over the past decade. From the sales force to the call center to the web site, and from branch offices to partners, there are an increasing number of touch points by which companies must now deliver accurate, timely and consistent location information.

Integratable and Real-Time

Location Information Management (LIM) brings together both the internal process of managing and creating location information and external needs and uses such as global data synchronization. This creates an end-to-end process that delivers integratable, real-time location information across the entire value chain.

Flexibility of your LIM data and capabilities are critical and can include:

• Internal collaboration via enterprise-wide business processes and workflow.
• Use of a central, comprehensive location information repository for a single version of the truth.
• Deployed as part of external synchronization with trading partners via public, private and proprietary platforms.

By addressing location information management, trading partner collaboration/synchronization, based on a central coding methodology that leverages an organization’s current numbering structure, systems and applications, consumer goods manufacturers and retailers can systematically drive value chain efficiency through real-time
access to accurate product and location information.

Optimize Quality and Effectiveness
Most corporations employ personnel who focus on the management of location content. However, few companies designate a single, centralized organization that ultimately owns location information. Instead, personnel tend to be organized around specific media. For example, the web team controls location information for the corporate eCommerce site, while a different group produces print catalogs. Although there is a need for media-specific expertise, a centralized team that takes full ownership of the quality, accuracy, and completeness of location information adds value and sales potential to the content. Consider this: Is your company organized properly to ensure that location information is gathered, enriched, and used as effectively as possible across all touch points? How are you managing this data now? Do you have a real strategy that addresses the thousands of openings, closings and changes in reporting that happen yearly? What about the millions of individual field-level changes that will happen each year?

Get ROI with LIM
From sales operations, electronic commerce and forecasting/demand management to supply chain, distribution/logistics and research, LIM data can and should support multiple business processes and serve
many users, each with different functional responsibility.

Proper use and integration of location information management data is a highly strategic investment offering a significant opportunity for return. For example, implementing an enterprise-wide LIM solution will significantly reduce costs by decreasing the manual effort necessary to maintain location information within the content team and across the enterprise. This will minimize inaccuracies, leading to improved customer satisfaction and lower processing costs. In addition, it will diminish the cost of integrating and maintaining redundant systems through centralization of location information.

And just as importantly, LIM not only reduces costs, but it also helps to grow revenue opportunities.

Revenue Growth Opportunities
Capturing the full value of your location information has demonstrable financial benefits and creates a substantial, long-term strategic advantage. Just some of the rewards include:

• Capturing full revenue and market share potential with new items through all locations—universal coverage.
• Maximizing profit margins by rapidly reflecting changes to customer location touch points.
• Increasing revenue per customer by maximizing trade spend opportunities.
• Improving sales of products by optimizing use of channels and partners.
• Reducing revenue loss resulting from returns by improving information quality.
• Customizing location information based on events, seasons, etc.
• Strategically managing account and market-level customer organization.

Today, location information is a strategic asset on par with product information, customer relationships and supply chain effectiveness. New commerce channels, especially the Internet, are exposing weaknesses in how location data has traditionally been collected and utilized. Now,
an investment in Location Information Management, with the appropriate alignment of organizational structures and processes, provides a sophisticated solution to optimize sales opportunities and enrich the customer experience.