Unisource Case Study

Background
Unisource is the leading independent marketer and distributor of commercial printing and business imaging papers, packaging systems and facility supplies and equipment in North America. With more than 100 distribution centers and a fleet of 2000 trucks, Unisource delivers locally, regionally and nationally.

Unisource offers the widest product selection in the industry, allowing customers to reduce suppliers, simplify the ordering process and lower the total cost of acquisition through savings in working capital, excess handling costs and inventory loss.

"There is no doubt that synchronizing our product information has positioned us well to squeeze cost out of our supply chain flow. We now have enterprise-wide visibility to consistent, high quality product data, enabling us to streamline strategic sourcing and replenishment processes while increasing our overall service levels."
-- Donna Long, Director of Information Technology

Introduction
Product Information Management (PIM) solutions can help companies increase business agility, improve customer service, and reduce costs, but only when they are properly integrated with key business processes. Getting from current state problems to effective, enterprise product information management requires flexible solutions that support a company’s need to migrate toward its long-term objectives. Working with Liaison Technologies, Unisource Worldwide is well on its way to establishing the capability for real-time product information management.

Challenge
Unisource grew primarily by acquiring regional distributors and was faced with having to manage multiple systems and multiple SKUs for the same product, making it difficult to get a clear picture of what was being bought and sold. In order to roll out national sales, marketing and manufacturing partnership programs, Unisource needed to consolidate and clean up its SKU-based product information. To facilitate improved buying, increased customer service levels and inventory cost reductions, the business needed more visibility into its inventory, which required a more centralized and standardized product item creation and item reconciliation process.

Unisource had more than 250K SKUs represented by close to 1 million distinct product codes with varying degrees of quality across geographies, therefore defining the need to cross-reference information according to a location within the country. Its in-house data management system was not scaleable to achieve the results the company required to meet its strategic initiatives in the prescribed time.

Solution
Unisource used a two-pronged approach to solve these problems. The ultimate vision was to have a centralized product item creation and management repository (Master Item File) for the entire company. Each product would have one item number that all locations used. However, the company had an intermediate need for a tool to help it reconcile the hundreds of thousands of SKUs from its regional systems to the Master Item File.

Liaison Technologies built a tool for Unisource that will help with both of these needs. The tool does the following:

  1. Offers SKU-matching functionality that allows users to search across hundreds of thousands of legacy SKUs, to match these to the Master Item File.
  2. Offers a centralized item creation process that helps distribute high-quality product data in a real-time fashion to all systems requiring product information (e.g., buying systems, order management, electronic commerce, catalog publishing, etc.)
  3. Enables Unisource buyers, merchandisers, and customer service representatives to consistently check product information in the system and create and maintain product data in real time, once.

Liaison Technologies’ product information management solution provides Unisource a cost-effective, hosted solution that leverages a real-time messaging architecture to help Unisource stay synchronized with its Master Item File hosted at Liaison Technologies. This functionality helps Unisource ensure that their transaction, reporting, and other sales and marketing systems are synchronized with the Liaison Technologies repository.

Results
Unisource now has a centralized product information repository that contains cross-references between its Master Item File and its legacy systems. It has replaced the product maintenance functions in virtually every one of its systems to now utilize this central repository, allowing internal buyers, sales reps and customer service reps as well as external customers and partners visibility to highquality, consistent product data. Liaison Technologies’ flexible solutions enabled Unisource to create a robust product information management capability while offering a set of interim solutions that facilitated Unisource’s orderly migration to its desired end state.