5 min
Why a supplier price list takes two days to check
Most of the file is identical to last quarter. That is exactly what makes it slow.
A distributor carries tens of thousands of lines. Twice a year, sometimes quarterly, each supplier sends a new price file. Someone has to work out which lines changed, by how much, and what that does to the sell price.
The file itself is not the problem. The problem is that almost all of it is the same as last time.
Sameness is what costs the time
If every line had moved, the job would be mechanical: take the new file, replace the old one, move on. Instead ninety-odd percent is identical, and the value of the work is entirely in the handful of rows that are not. Finding those rows by eye means reading every row, including the ones that will turn out not to matter.
That is why the estimate people give is always in days rather than hours. They are not pricing the decisions. They are pricing the search.
Their references are not your references
The second cost is matching. The supplier writes NF 9043 MCB16; your catalogue
holds NF-9043-MCB16. A person reads those as the same product without
noticing they did any work. An exact comparison does not: it reports no match,
and the line falls into a pile that has to be gone through by hand.
Spacing, casing, leading zeros, a description that was shortened to fit a column — each one on its own is trivial, and together they are the reason a comparison that “should be automatic” ends up manual.
The rows that should stop you
Some rows genuinely need a person:
- A line that repeats further down the file with the same reference and price. Approve the sheet as it stands and it is counted twice.
- A line with no price in the cell at all. Until the supplier answers, it can be neither approved nor safely ignored.
- A line whose reference matches nothing in the catalogue. It may be a new product, or a renamed old one, and those need different answers.
A system that guesses at these is worse than one that does not try. The useful behaviour is to separate them out and say why each one was set aside.
What is actually worth building
Not a tool that decides prices. A tool that does the search and the matching, hands back a sheet of the lines that changed, and puts the rows it could not decide in front of a person with the reason attached.
The decisions stay where they were. What goes away is reading nine thousand rows to find the two hundred that moved.
The supplier price update sprint is this work as a fixed scope, on your own files.