By David Binkley, Senior Technical Account Manager, Harte-Hanks Trillium Software
As many of you may know, the weather here in the United States has been rather unique this summer. It’s been extremely hot and dry in the South and Southwest and extremely rainy here in the Northeast. Take those conditions into effect; add a random earthquake and a hurricane or two; and you’ve got a very challenging opportunity for many of our clients.
Well, I just happened to be at one of those clients recently, whose shipping operations were badly impacted by all of the above external conditions. This particular customer happens to be a manufacturer of extremely expensive products that are required to be refrigerated from the point of manufacturing to the final point of use. 
Taking into account the disruptions of power in the East from hurricanes like Irene, the client needed to be able to effectively synchronize product manufacturing and shipments to their customers in regions where the power grid was not impacted, or to hold the manufacturing of products for those areas where the power was likely to be out. Because this client has excellent data quality control over their shipping information, the IT and shipping departments were able to quickly identify potentially impacted orders and have customer service representatives contact the customer to either reschedule the deliveries or confirm that delivery was still requested.
Now you might ask, how much of an impact did data quality really have on this situation? Well, take the following into account:
To identify the orders that were impacted, the customer first needed to know what products required refrigeration, and that required accurate coding of the components of the order. Second the order had to be evaluated as to the location of the actual shipping address, and that shipping address had to be evaluated as to its accurate location within the affected delivery areas. Third, the customer had to be contacted via phone, e-mail etc. to verify that the order could still be sent.
Finally, the shipper had to coordinate its impacted delivery areas with our customer’s shipments to make sure that the shipper’s distribution centers were also not impacted by the weather. ALL OF THIS INFORMATION relies on the quality of data!!
Fortunately, for our customer and thousands of their customers, all of the above worked out. Literally thousands of shipments were halted, re-routed or otherwise modified to make sure product would not be impacted by these events. Production runs were modified to make up for halted orders and business resumed as normal after a week or so.
In fact, the only problem I heard about was that some reports weren’t out at their usual time the day after manufacturing and shipping had set an all-time record for orders fulfilled in a single day as catch-up processing was in full bloom. Well, I guess you just can’t win them all…
Think about it. Would your data and its quality permit you to respond as well?