SCHAUMBURG, Ill. -- The Nielsen Co. has signed agreements with eight top convenience store retailers. It has signed contracts with leading retailers, including Circle K, Cumberland Farms, Murphy USA, Valero and Wilson Farms. The agreements represent a total of 7,400 U.S. stores.
Under the census agreements, Schaumburg, Ill.-based Nielsen will provide consumer product goods (CPG) manufacturers with access to weekly data and sales insights for every one of the convenience retailers' corporate stores, enabling manufacturers to analyze granular insights [image-nocss] and implement plans at the store-level.
The retailers will use Nielsen's Convenience Track product, which upholds the industry standard as defined by TDLinx, a service of The Nielsen Co., and is endorsed by the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS).
Convenience Track offers what it said is the most representative and trendable convenience channel read in the marketplace with appropriate representation of chains, franchises and independents and more than two years of history.
Separately, Temple, Texas-based McLane Co. Inc. and TDLinx have announced an alliance that delivers integration-ready distributor data to consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers. Delivering TDLinx Codes through McLane's M-Pulse data warehouse enables CPG manufacturers to communicate with McLane code-to-code about retail, seamlessly integrate disparate retail data sources, improve business intelligence and simplify processes.
The alliance is the first of its kind for a convenience store distributor and syndicated data provider, the companies said.
Our M-Pulse data revolves around store location informationdistribution, replenishment and velocity, said Stuart Clark, vice president of convenience sales for McLane. Integration of TDLinx Codes into M-Pulse expands our flexibility to address a broad range of collaborative capabilities with our supplier community including distribution of product, enhancing targeted data collection, forecasting, reporting and overall decision making. Seamless planning and execution is core to maintaining our position as a highly responsive, innovative partner. Having the ability to work code-to-code with trading partners via TDLinx enables us to meet and exceed customer expectations, increase our speed and efficiency and provide a significant competitive advantage for all involved.
McLane will append TDLinx codes to its store-level distributor data sent to CPG manufacturer clients. The TDLinx code provides the link between McLane's M-Pulse distributor data to the TDLinx-coded data in the CPG manufacturer's customer master database. With the TDLinx-coded data, CPG manufacturers will have a simpler, more streamlined process for integrating distributor data into their data warehouses and will be able to align with industry-standard channel and market definitions, retail account hierarchies and other syndicated retail data sources.
McLane provides supply chain services throughout the United States, delivering food and nonfood products to more than 60,000 customer locations, including the convenience store, drug store, mass merchandise, quick service restaurant and movie theater industries. It operates 19 grocery distribution divisions and 18 foodservice distribution centers as well as an industry specific software company. McLane is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Omaha.
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