Guildford, UK – House of Fraser, one of the most prestigious names on the UK high street, this week (June 9, 2008) announced it will be revolutionising its supply chain capabilities with the implementation of the Inovis Data Synchronisation service. The service will allow House of Fraser to synchronise product data with a single point of communication through which data and images for millions of seasonal products are captured from their suppliers.

Working with Inovis, House of Fraser and its suppliers will significantly increase efficiency by eliminating costly mistakes caused by poor data quality and reduce the time taken to capture information by as much as 50 percent on hundreds of thousands of items every year. The Inovis Data Synchronisation service will provide all House of Fraser suppliers with a collaborative platform that delivers complete and consistent data on all product attributes such as price, colour, size and even multiple electronic images associated with individual items. This information is captured and managed by Inovis and distributed to House of Fraser in a single format, eliminating the need for staff to spend time manually finding, formatting and re-keying data for every product stocked.

John King, CEO, House of Fraser, said: "The need to streamline electronic communication with all of our suppliers has been clear for some time. By synchronising product data and images we can increase communication efficiency and decrease errors. This will lead to improved sales by avoiding costly mistakes for both House of Fraser and for our suppliers. I’d like to see the communication traffic between House of Fraser and our suppliers to be about sales, new store openings, exciting new products and our joint customers rather than about data related issues."

John Redfern, Managing Director, Inovis EMEA, said: "The addition of House of Fraser to our Data Synchronisation platform is an important step in expanding our footprint in the general merchandise and fashion market here in the United Kingdom, and an equally significant move for the industry. The platform that we have built offers tremendous opportunities to customers in the general merchandise market and will help them to focus their highly-skilled and commercially-minded staff on driving new business, improving service for customers and improving the bottom line. At the moment, they are too often distracted by the administrative burden created by inefficient exchange and use of product data and the time has come for this to change."

Colin Porter, Commercial Director, House of Fraser, said: "Inovis is the ideal partner to launch product data and image synchronisation here in the UK. We have spent considerable time on finding a solution that improves our data collection efficiencies but also benefits our suppliers. Because Inovis Data Synchronisation is a third party collaborative service, other retailers can use the system to access data across suppliers, and suppliers will have a single place to automatically update their other retail customers with product information. This is a service we could not have offered our suppliers alone."

For more information, visit www.inovis.co.uk/data_sync.html