Talend announced that Travis Perkins plc. is utilizing Talend Data Integration to streamline product data repositories, warehouse and e-commerce functions. Using Talend, Travis Perkins employees can now easily identify duplicates in the inventory system and immediately normalize them so that everyone has a correct view of what's being sold and the company can accurately showcase its breadth of offerings online.

Travis Perkins amassed an inventory of more than half a million items, but information on those products was scattered amongst disparate databases and antiquated enterprise resource planning systems. In order to better serve customer needs, the company moved to a multi-channel selling model, requiring that it migrate its vast product collection online. They had to find an efficient way of pulling together the varied information sources into a unified online catalog. This meant going through the entire inventory, categorizing products, manually filling in missing information and standardizing formats.

As with any large catalog, some information had simply been left out or erroneously populated. The result was lost sales opportunities. Talend software was deployed to help the organization comb through records and identify gaps.

Within the first six months of implementation, more than 30,000 product data updates were made. Talend Data Integration and improved product information helped Travis Perkins significantly increase online sales. With Talend Data Integration, Travis Perkins is able to validate product descriptions to ensure each one lists the features, benefits, uses and price. For example, it will flag a description containing less than 10 characters because that's insufficient detail needed for customers to make an informed purchase.

As a result of having more detailed product descriptions with brand and category names - which drive meta-data descriptions - Travis Perkins has significantly boosted its organic SEO rankings. Todd said the Wickes chain is now showing up in the top five results in Google search for many common industry terms such as doors.