Supplier price-file processing — Summary

Merchandising · Merchandise Planner · Runs weekly100% complete

1 waiting for a decision

Biggest wins in this workflow

SimplifyAuto-ingest supplier price files (step 2)≈ 22h/yr · ~25m/run

Hands-on time per run

2.6h

≈ 134 h a year

Planned to free (accepted)

0m per run

≈ 0 hours a year back to the team once done

Still open (recommendations to review)

25m per run

0m planned + 25m open + 2.2h untouched = 2.6h per run

≈ 22 hours a year if all adopted. Accepted ones sit under Planned to free; nothing here counts more than its step costs

Already automated today

0 of 7 steps

0m of hands-on time is on partly systematised steps — honest baseline, not opportunity

Top friction points

Worst first — how much a step hurts, multiplied by how long it takes. So a long mildly annoying step can outrank a short painful one.

Step	Who does it	Kind of pain	Hurts	Time	Why it hurts
Rank 1, step 2, Fix the layout — every supplier uses a different format, so columns get moved and sizes retyped by hand	Category Assistant	—	badly	35m	Same fixes every single week; two suppliers send PDFs
Rank 2, step 3, Match supplier product codes to our item numbers	Merchandise Planner	—	a lot	40m	Lookup table lives in someone's personal spreadsheet

Recommendations

To review1

🔧 Change how these are done (1)~25m/run

Step 2Simplifyneeds setting up

Auto-ingest supplier price files

~25m per run of the step's 35m

How ▾

Price files already arrive by email and SFTP. A build watches the supplier file exchange and normalises each supplier's known layout into our columns — the weekly reformatting disappears; a person checks the result instead of retyping it. The two suppliers who send PDFs still need a hand until they send spreadsheets.

Accepted0

None

Not now0

None

Manual hand-offs between systems

2 → 3Data moves from Excel to Retail ERP by hand here.

Worked out from the systems named on each step, so check it against how the work really goes. No time or cost is counted for these.