The Problem

Standardising and processing product specifications can be difficult – each supplier has their own data format and their own unique terms for product attributes.

Even once companies standardise their suppliers’ data, it can require a lot of manual work to fit that data into the template they require for their systems – product upload templates or pricing calculations can be complex and prone to manual errors. It can also be difficult to work out which products are new or updated, while skipping those which have not changed, and so do not need to be reuploaded again.

 

Our Solution

TDI has created a database solution, running on the Python web framework, Django and PostgreSQL. It allows us to easily standardise supplier product data and unique terms into one format, with minimal manual data processing.

The system is flexible enough to allow us to customise the export of that data into whichever format our clients’ systems require, while still allowing them to modify attributes and data structures to meet their needs – including automatic calculation of selling prices based on supplier list prices and client target profit margins.

Our database even checks each product to see if it is new, updated or unchanged on import, to ensure that we only give clients data for products that need to be uploaded to their systems, often substantially reducing upload times.

We are already using this solution for a number of clients in the bioreagents industry, and it has dramatically reduced the amount of time it takes to process a supplier data file – what used to be a manual, error prone process that took over a day, is often now easily done within a couple of hours.

At the time of writing, the bioreagents database:

• Holds over 200,000 products and product sizes from a range of suppliers.
• Can correct and standardise the names of over 600 organisms, 200 product applications (experiment types) and 200 product conjugations.
• Exports data ready for upload into a Magento 2 eCommerce website for a number of clients, each with different attributes and needs, with no manual modifications required.