Star-Telegram Upgrades TMC Performance & Efficiency

Business Requirements

• The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s TMC process has gradually evolved over the past ten years. Although the process was a stable one, the volume of resources needed for support and execution of the TMC program made it highly inefficient. The previous process had layers of code, the occasional antiquated business rule(s) and several external procedures which required manual execution.
• The goal was to recreate the TMC process within MaaX in order to consolidate processes, simplify data management and business rule maintenance and, most importantly, free up much-needed resources which could be allocated toward other projects

MaaX™ Deployment

In order to fully re-engineer the TMC process within MaaX, the S-T loads several key pieces of data that are instrumental to the TMC process.

• The Computerized Delivery Sequence file (known to most as CDS) comprises the data “backbone” critical to the TMC process. This file contains all valid physical addresses as defined by the United States Postal Service.
• The second key data component loaded into MaaX is the S-T’s circulation data. For purposes of TMC optimization, particular focus is given to service type (or frequency).
• The S-T loads all special “adds” and Do Not Mail files that are compiled on a daily basis.
• In addition to the aforementioned data sets, a “TMC-to-Postal Carrier Route” cross reference table is loaded. This table serves as the heart and soul of the TMC process as it defines which postal carrier routes receive the TMC product. This table is maintained by the S-T’s Circulation department and is updated in MaaX weekly.
• With all the essential data loaded into MaaX, the S-T executes a single query that looks at three derived, or “virtual,” fields to determine whether an address should be included or excluded from the TMC file.

Results

By leveraging MaaX to completely re-engineer the TMC process, the Star-Telegram has realized significant benefits across the board.

• The newspaper has substantially reduced the number of total hours (both processing and man-hours) allocated to the TMC process each week from roughly 30 hours to at most ONE hour. Prior to the redesign, the S-T would start the process on Monday morning and finish sometime Wednesday afternoon. Now the file is ready when they get in on Monday morning.
• Having the TMC process in MaaX also simplifies running address-specific TMC based off of demographic selection criteria such as income, home value, etc. With all the data already in MaaX, there is no overhead cost associated with data hygiene work in order to prepare the data sources for matching.

• Management of the TMC process has been extremely simplified. There were easily ten data-transformation packages run each week and over 50 pages of SQL code supporting the former process. If something changed or if there were an error it took several hours to track down and fix. In MaaX, the process is simplified to three virtual fields and a query.