This food services company is the leading foodservice distribution network in the US. This company has accounts in all segments of the foodservice industry and has a collective sales volume of over $31 billion . They deal with major suppliers of national brands on a consistent basis and operate a rebate program. Bill is the director of the rebate program and part of his job is to integrate supplier data into their own system.
Most of the supplier data would come in a predefined format that would easily be uploaded into their sales system, but not all. Some of the suppliers would send their data via Excel sheets in their own format including custom status codes and customer identifiers. Bill would manually have to go through the spread sheet and create another sheet with the missing and translated data. Needless to say, this was a laborious task and Bill thought there were better uses of his time.
This company needed a solution that was both easy to use and could be executed quickly. They needed something they could turn to and just “run it” whenever they received data from a particular customer. And as this was a small, but time-consuming, piece of the overall process, it had to be unobtrusive.
After looking in the market at various tools, this food services company eventually went with Centerprise. Centerprise was able to do exactly what they needed. Bill was able to use the visual drag-n-drop mapping with little fuss. He used Centerprise’s static lookups to easily build the code translations for each supplier’s status codes. He used the database lookup to find the correct customer based on the supplier’s own customer identifier. In short, Centerprise was able to provide a simple, but effective solution to an otherwise tedious problem.
After some initial setup to develop the mappings for each supplier, Bill is able to transform and import data into their own systems in no time. In fact, Bill runs the transformations from a command line and just double-clicks a batch file when he gets new supplier data. With manual spreadsheet manipulation out of the way, Bill is able to concentrate on processing rebates faster and without the context switch that was frequently involved.