Supplier onboarding
Supplier onboarding is the work of turning a supplier’s product spreadsheet into products your store or PIM can import: mapped, cleaned, filled in and checked.
- Supplier data onboarding
- Product data onboarding
What it means
A supplier’s spreadsheet is an export from their own systems. The columns are named for their warehouse, the categories are in their words, and the codes mean something to their stock room rather than to your shoppers. Onboarding covers everything between that file landing in your inbox and its products importing cleanly.
It is four jobs in one: mapping their columns to your fields, cleaning what they sent, filling what they left out and checking the result before anything goes live. Each step needs the one before it, so the order matters.
The first file from a supplier takes longest, because the column mapping is built then. Later files reuse it, so only new columns and new values need a decision.
Think of it like this
Think of the goods-in bay at a warehouse. Each delivery is checked against the order, relabelled with your own codes and shelved your way before anything goes on sale.
For example
A new supplier sends Desc, Dims and Bin Loc columns, barcodes Excel has turned into 5.01235E+12 and no capacities. Onboarding maps Desc to Description, splits Dims into three columns and leaves Bin Loc out. It asks for the original export to recover the barcodes, and finds each capacity on the manufacturer’s page.
Why it matters
Spreadsheets change data without asking: Microsoft says Excel “automatically removes leading zeros, and converts large numbers to scientific notation”.1 So keep the supplier’s file exactly as it arrived and work on a copy. When a value turns out to be wrong, you can then show whether the supplier sent it or it changed on the way.
Not to be confused with
In purchasing, supplier onboarding can also mean setting up a supplier’s account: contracts, bank details and compliance checks. In product data it means their spreadsheet, and getting its products into your catalogue.
Sources
- Microsoft Support. Keeping leading zeros and large numbers.