Christopher J Pizzi

Developed System to Export EDI Purchase Orders from RetailStream

Challenge: Customer needs to keep in-store displays fully stocked

Solution: Generate order forms in RetailStream and submit them daily to an EDI provider

One of National In-Store's clients is a health & beauty product supplier. NIS would dispatch its contractors to CVS stores every month to audit the supplier's displays and report any items that were running low or out of stock. NIS would then submit purchase orders based the previous day's data to an EDI provider.

The supplier would send NIS a spreadsheet describing their products, product prices, and position of the products on the in-store display. I incorporated this data into the RetailStream database and used it to generate both paper and web-based order forms. If a contractor took a survey for this particular job, they would see the custom order form (which resembled their paper order form) instead of the standard survey form.

In addition to submitting orders electonically the contractors also faxed their paper order forms to NIS. Each form had a barcode identifying the particular retail location for which orders should be placed. RetailStream would read the fax images and metadata from the fax software and associate them with the appropriate assignments.

Finally, I created a Python-based website specifically to combine RetailStream data with the customer-supplied spreadsheet data. It displayed monthly and store-by-store order summaries. For each store it showed the faxed order form for that store and an Excel purchase order suitable for submission to NIS's EDI provider. It would also combine a day's worth of orders into a multi-tab Excel document which account managers would download every morning and submit to the EDI provider.