Landmark Wholesale Limited is one of the largest grocery wholesale groups in the UK, with an annual turnover of approximately £2 billion.

With a Central Office in Milton Keynes, serving 30 independent wholesale members, using 15 different tilling systems, each with its own product codes and descriptions, it can be a challenge for Landmark to gather point of sale information from such a disparate group of operators.

Nevertheless, Landmark has recognised the value of being able to harness the group’s sales information so that it can understand the performance of its members, group trading activity, customer behaviour, promotions, product launches and category drivers. Landmark was the first wholesaler to recognise that there is an inherent monetary value in this type of information and thus it is packaged and sold to its suppliers who also want to understand sales performance within the wholesale sector and, in particular, their own product portfolio.

As a wholesale operator with a lean Central Office team, Landmark recognised that gathering point of sale data, merging it into one data warehouse and producing accurate reporting from the information was not its core business. Therefore, Landmark made the strategic decision to outsource the full data management process. The JPA team has, consequently, been the data management provider of choice to Landmark since 2002.

JPA has three full time Data Analysts permanently located in Landmark’s Milton Keynes office. The team is further supported by a team of developers and an account manager. JPA undertakes all aspects of Landmark’s point of sale data management, including:

Creating routines to gather the data from the depots on a nightly basis.

Managing a data warehouse environment and running processes to load and store the point of sale information.

Liaising with Landmark members when there is an issue with the data and finding resolutions.

Checking and validating the data for optimum accuracy.

Merging the individual depot codes and descriptions into Central Office codes to provide a single view of sales.

Creating bespoke reports for Central Office buyers and Landmark’s suppliers who purchase the point of sale data.

Liaising with the Landmark buying team and the suppliers to determine their data requirements and identify opportunities for new reports.

Support the buying team by encouraging suppliers to purchase the point of sale information by attending sales meetings and presenting the data.

Landmark and JPA have worked closely together for a long time. By placing staff into Landmark’s offices, the JPA team sometimes feels more like they are employed by Landmark than JPA but we both see this as a good thing. Because we work so closely together, Landmark is assured at all times of JPA’s absolute commitment to the success of the service and is able to see first hand how hard we work to deliver a top class data management service.