Adventures in Data Processing

The man’s tone was solemn; his usually voluble partner was silent.

“Our consultant projected a sales increase of 300 percent. We significantly boosted spending to handle it.”

“And what sales increase are you seeing?” I asked.

He paused. “We’ve had a 25-percent drop. We’re nearly bankrupt.”

Catalogers put a lot of time, money and emotional effort into fine-tuning their positioning, design, circulation and product line. But when it comes to data processing (DP), most catalogers simply trust that all will be well.

This can lead to disaster. In the true example given above, the business-to-business cataloger’s consultant had promised a 300-percent increase in sales, based on superior list selection. But the fulfillment house pulled the wrong SIC codes, the wrong names were mailed, and sales crashed.

The cataloger could have checked the DP results with as much care as he or she routinely proofed design, color and printing. The following basic proofing steps will detect many DP problems:

• Examine partial dumps of rented lists to confirm you’re getting the lists you’re ordering.

• Review output counts by mailing code to confirm that list segmentation is correct.

• Review live ink-jet output at bindery start-up to confirm that the names, mail codes and customer numbers being printed are correct.

Unfortunately, few catalogers use all three, or even two, of these steps.

The Competence Quotient

A cataloger’s in-house DP publishing guru of 10 years suddenly departed, and I was speaking with his replacement by phone.

“So I’ll need your housefile for the next mailing sometime around Friday,” I said.

“I only accept list requests on Mondays,” he said.

“But see, we need the list by this Friday, or we’ll miss the mailing.”

“You should have asked me last Monday.”

Despite the latest round of layoffs by the dot-coms, the market for employees with DP experience still is tight—which means some pretty odd ducks are showing up when catalogers advertise for system administrators. In the true example noted above, the cataloger had employed for many years a wonderful system administrator who had fine-tuned the company’s system to something approaching perfection. And then she left ... and the perfect cataloging system suddenly looked like a nest of undocumented confusion.

The cataloger hired a replacement—and got a person who could barely find a keyboard. Successive replacements got progressively worse, in part because the guru’s long-time expertise had insulated management from even learning how to hire DP personnel. The company finally found a competent replacement and became functional again. It would’ve been better if management had insisted on documentation for all internal changes and required the guru to train one or two in-house replacements.

A Little Oversight

A cataloger delivered his files as usual to a well-known DP house, and received a seemingly routine segment count report. But a closer look showed discrepancies in the counts. There wasn’t a single, huge error, but many small errors were randomly scattered everywhere. More detailed reports confirmed the errors, but offered no clue as to their cause.

Finally, a talk with the DP house’s senior programmer revealed the problem. An error in one of the DP house’s internal programs was causing data in delimited files to slide into empty data fields. So if an address field was empty, the city name would slide into it, and then the state would slide left into the city, and so on. If the file had been mailed, response would have been 10 percent to 15 percent less, with no one the wiser.

Few catalogers realize that when files are sent to a DP house, someone there must write some custom code before the data can be handled. Yes, DP houses use standardized programs, but before those programs can begin, someone must type in the layout of the input files, and often additional bits of manual coding are needed. As any programmer will admit, one-off code is the most error-prone part of any computer system.

In the example noted above, workers at a respected DP house erred while trying to deal with a format that was unusual for them. They wrote custom code to handle it, and their coding mistakenly assumed all fields would contain data. When the fields were empty, the code misbehaved. The error was insidious, because it corrupted only some of the records.

Had the mailer failed to check on seemingly minor count discrepancies, his response would have been down 10 percent to 15 percent. He would’ve looked for weaknesses in design or merchandising, while the true culprit was a bit of hand-coded Cobol in a program buried deep in the DP house.

Change Is Good?

A well-established food cataloger’s circulation plan anticipated a 30-percent increase in sales, based on a precise sequence of mailings to the highly segmented housefile.

“Unfortunately, we can’t implement this circulation plan this year,” said the cataloger.

“Why not?” asked the surprised agency rep.

“You know that new computer and software we installed? Our IT department said it couldn’t import the history fields into the proper fields in the new system, so it put them somewhere else. But the people who did it have left now, and nobody can pin down exactly where the data went.”

“So you’re saying you’ve lost your RFM fields,” said the agency rep.

“Yes,” said the cataloger.

A perilous time for any cataloger is when its software is changed. Why? Every catalog software package has unique “ideas” about how and where to store basic catalog data. In addition, most in-house DP departments know the software they’ve installed, not how to transfer data between incompatible systems. Because of these two factors, the data are frequently lost or left behind during a system switchover. This causes moderate to substantial impairments to the circulation plan, which reduces sales.

If you’re contemplating a computer hardware or software change, understand what data won’t survive the transfer. Think about what the data loss will mean in terms of creating and implementing a good circulation plan.

What’s the Solution?

“Thank you!” exclaimed the DP house rep.

“For what?” asked the marketing analyst. He was new at this cataloger and had just sent a clear, basic set of instructions to the DP house for an upcoming mailing.

“Your DP instructions—they’re fabulous!” said the DP house rep. “I wish every cataloger sent us instructions like this.”

“Don’t they?”

The rep asked, “Are you joking?”

Create and send a complete set of DP instructions to your DP house for each mailing. You’ve worked long and hard on the catalog you’re mailing; why shy away from a few hours of sweating over a good set of DP instructions?

In time, you’ll find the job becomes easier (though never truly easy). Without realizing it, your sales and response results will improve, because some of the undetected errors of the past will no longer occur.

Indeed, of all the things you can do to improve the DP process, providing clearly written instructions to the DP house before each mailing is one of the least costly and most beneficial steps you can take as a cataloger.

Susan McIntyre is president of McIntyre Direct, a catalog consulting company based in Portland, OR. She can be reached at (503) 735-9515.