Hey there, I'm kinda looking for ideas of how to tackle this problem. I wish to deal with some sales analysis, but first I have to fix the way data reaches us.
(1) We have quite a few different SKU's, about 600. Some quite similar to one another (e.g. XXXX deluxe edition / XXXX limited edition), and many retailers that report to us their stock and sales on a weekly basis.
(2) A few report on a month to date format and others on a weekly sales format. Not only that but the formats (although all in excel) differ greatly from each other. Plus many add a new column every week/month as they keep the whole history.
(3) To further the chaos only a few use the UPC for reporting the products, and even those have quite a few mistakes in the marked UPC for their products. Many actually use SKU in place of the UPC for reporting and might not even store the UPC (they actually mislabel SKU as UPC in some reports). Some even actually change the SKU without any notice or apparent reason.
To fix this I've made a conversion table for each one of the retailers, which I use thru VLOOKUP to match the correct one. Then I will proceed to generate a PivotTable and match the correct stock/sales to an excel of mine; their columns usually have different names and its a bit cumbersome to be doing manually so I want to automatize this process.
I'm thinking of using VBA for this thru searching specific column names in specific named sheets for each Retailer and also using VLOOKUP thru the macor on a specifically named sheet. Then all I have to do every week is add the sheet they report to my own report and rename it, e.g. "Retailer 1" & "Retailer 1UPC"; then run a macro specific to this retailer. But I probably will have to write a code for each retailer we have.
Any ideas? I'm open to using other tools/database if it is a better solution.
(1) We have quite a few different SKU's, about 600. Some quite similar to one another (e.g. XXXX deluxe edition / XXXX limited edition), and many retailers that report to us their stock and sales on a weekly basis.
(2) A few report on a month to date format and others on a weekly sales format. Not only that but the formats (although all in excel) differ greatly from each other. Plus many add a new column every week/month as they keep the whole history.
(3) To further the chaos only a few use the UPC for reporting the products, and even those have quite a few mistakes in the marked UPC for their products. Many actually use SKU in place of the UPC for reporting and might not even store the UPC (they actually mislabel SKU as UPC in some reports). Some even actually change the SKU without any notice or apparent reason.
To fix this I've made a conversion table for each one of the retailers, which I use thru VLOOKUP to match the correct one. Then I will proceed to generate a PivotTable and match the correct stock/sales to an excel of mine; their columns usually have different names and its a bit cumbersome to be doing manually so I want to automatize this process.
I'm thinking of using VBA for this thru searching specific column names in specific named sheets for each Retailer and also using VLOOKUP thru the macor on a specifically named sheet. Then all I have to do every week is add the sheet they report to my own report and rename it, e.g. "Retailer 1" & "Retailer 1UPC"; then run a macro specific to this retailer. But I probably will have to write a code for each retailer we have.
Any ideas? I'm open to using other tools/database if it is a better solution.
