Suppliers send price lists as spreadsheets attached to emails, in whatever format they happen to use, whenever they happen to change. The retailer reconciled them once a month. Anything that moved on the second of the month was sold at the old margin for four weeks.
Why the spreadsheet was not the problem
The reconciliation itself took an afternoon. The cost was the lag: a whole month of selling against numbers that had already changed, discovered after the fact and impossible to unwind.
What we put on the board
A Source Reader watches the supplier mailbox, opens each attachment whatever shape it arrives in, and pulls out the lines that changed. A Record Cleaner writes those changes against the product records and flags anything that would push a listing below its margin floor.
- Nothing is written to a live listing without a person approving it.
- A change that crosses the margin floor is escalated the same hour, not batched.
- The original attachment stays linked to the change, so the source is one click away.
- Anything the reader cannot parse is handed to a person rather than skipped quietly.
The month end surprise was never the spreadsheet. It was the four weeks before it.